The Italian businessman suing The Londoner for £250,000 in damages didn’t turn up at court yesterday for the first hearing in his defamation case against us.
Claudio Di Giovanni, who The Londoner exposed as a serial property scammer, brought a libel case against us in October last year after we refused to take down our story about him. He also brought the case against the freelance reporter who wrote the story, Cormac Kehoe, and we are including him in our defence.
We found that Di Giovanni was renting out London homes and then subletting them on Airbnb and Booking.com for as much as six times the original price. The holidaymakers staying in the homes he was subletting described “filthy” conditions, and one woman told us she had been electrocuted by the dishwasher. Multiple landlords complained of unpaid rent and damage to their properties.
Yesterday morning, we filed into the wood-panelled, marble-pillared environs of Court 13 at the Royal Courts of Justice, seeking to have Di Giovanni’s case thrown out. The Londoner’s barrister, Claire Overman of Doughty Street Chambers, told the court that our defence against the claim was “bound to succeed” and that Di Giovanni had failed to file any evidence or respond to any of our messages in the run up to the hearing.
Late last month, Di Giovanni (whose name is sometimes spelled "De Giovanni") informed us that he was unable to attend the hearing because he had undergone an operation in Italy. He included a note from a hospital in Naples — written in Italian — and asked for the hearing to be adjourned until he had recovered from his operation. This was the first time he had mentioned the procedure, and he did not provide a translation of the short note.
On Sunday afternoon, he sent us a new note, this time in English. Neither document was clearly signed by a doctor, and the new one in English was notably longer than the original, although it carried the same date (26 February).
After considering the evidence, Mrs Justice Tipples granted his application for an adjournment, setting a new trial date of 21 April 2026.
However, the judge criticised Di Giovanni sharply, saying his medical evidence was “not in a satisfactory state”, because it didn’t have the name of a doctor and wasn’t accompanied by a professional translation. However, she said she had to “take it at face value”. She also said it was “unsatisfactory” that he had not notified the court he would be unavailable for the hearing before his apparent surgery.
The judge ordered Di Giovanni to present his skeleton argument to the court a week before the next hearing. Crucially, she asked him to identify the doctor who treated him and who wrote the two notes.
Mrs Justice Tipples acknowledged that Di Giovanni’s no-show yesterday will likely increase the legal costs for The Londoner. She asked our solicitor Anne Mannion from Lewis Silkin to identify the costs that we had “thrown away” because of the adjournment. The case has already cost us around £20,000.
Editor’s note
By Joshi Herrmann
As I wrote in my previous editor’s note in January, we stand fully behind our reporting on Claudio Di Giovanni, and we plan to win this case in court. Wealthy and powerful people in London have spent decades using legal action to suppress negative stories about them. We can only revive journalism in this city by standing up to that kind of intimidation.
Di Giovanni doesn’t have a valid case against us and has never identified any factual errors in the piece. He is trying to force us to take down a story that he knows is true. The investigation was deeply sourced by our freelance reporter Cormac Kehoe and edited by two senior editors at Mill Media, the independent media company that publishes The Londoner. It was reviewed by our excellent lawyers.
Nevertheless, Di Giovanni pursued Cormac personally in the courts before eventually bringing a high court case against Cormac, Mill Media and me personally. We have folded the county court case against Cormac into our own and are covering the cost of defending both cases.
I’ve been in journalism for more than 15 years, and I’m relatively hardened to the legal threats we face. Cormac is a young and incredibly talented journalist, and sitting next to him in the intimidating, high-Victorian grandeur of Court 13 yesterday made me think about how stressful it must be to be hit with litigation like this so early in your career.
Di Giovanni’s legal action is having the opposite of its desired effect: thousands more readers have read the story since he brought the case against us. This is often the case when people try to bully media companies into taking down legitimate journalism.
Last week, I was on a panel about abusive legal cases targeting journalism at the UK Media Freedom Forum 2026. Sitting next to me was Sirin Kale, a brilliant Guardian journalist who spent several years defending a libel case brought by the actor Noel Clarke. The Guardian won the case, but only after spending more than £6 million, a sum that very few media companies could afford.
I told the audience that I think we will only turn the tide against these abusive legal threats if we, as journalists, shine a proper light on them and talk readers through exactly what we are experiencing. That’s why I wrote my editor’s note in January, and that’s why we’re publishing this update today.
I felt extremely moved when reading some of your comments under the editor’s note. “I admire all involved at The Londoner for taking this on, and for providing some much needed integrity into the media,” one member wrote. Another congratulated us for “standing up to such bullying tactics”.
Thank you so much for your support. It means a lot — not just financially, but in terms of feeling like we have a community standing behind us. We’ll update you as soon as possible, and certainly after the next hearing on 21 April.
If you're a free reader of The Londoner and you’d like to back us in this case, I’d love to have your support. This kind of work investigating the rich and powerful is only possible through the backing of our paid members. They're the lifeblood of our community, allowing our fearless, vital journalism to remain independent, beholden only to you. If you agree that's what the capital desperately needs, then click the button below.
