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Comedian Mockridge
Photo: Guido Kirchner / dpa
It was one of the hardest-fought social media debates of the year: Teams around Ines Anioli and Luke Mockridge had formed on the Internet and they heaped serious accusations on each other without even knowing what it was about. So we did research to find out what was behind it, read the investigation files, found an ex-girlfriend of Mockridge, who affirmed that she had had a similarly toxic relationship as Anioli. And we spoke to more than ten women who said Mockridge had assaulted them.
The publication sparked a great response, moderator Klaas Heufer-Umlauf commented on it, at the German Comedy Prize the actress Maren Kroymann called for a different approach to the case, comedian Hazel Brugger and her husband Thomas Spitzer wore T-shirts with the imprint »Consequences for Comedian XY «. The tabloid media also reported widely.
At the same time there was a lot of criticism, there was talk of a pillory and the presumption of innocence, which of course should also apply to Anioli. The comedians Oliver Pocher and Tom Gerhardt sided with Mockridge, others who had previously shown solidarity with him deleted their comments on Instagram. We got hate messages. The media wrote about our reporting, sometimes in a highly distorted and incorrect manner, questioning whether it was permissible to report suspicion on the subject. And Mockridge complained.
The Regional Court of Cologne considered our reporting to be admissible in principle and only agreed to one point, we had to delete four sentences for the time being.
Mockridge's lawyer then took the other points to the Hamburg Regional Court of equal rank, which accepted the case and forbade a longer passage on Aniolis' allegations.
We take action against this, in terms of content and form, if necessary up to the Federal Constitutional Court.
In our opinion, it shouldn't be the case that you can go from court to court until you find one that appeals to you more.