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Rushdie gets apology for defamation

LONDON: Facts were facts and he wouldn’t let anyone mess with them in the name of free speech.

That was novelist Salman Rushdie’s argument when he sued the publishers of an unflattering book about him by a former police officer, Ron Evans.

And on Tuesday he won that argument with Mr. Evans offering him a public apology at the High Court here.

Speaking to the media as he emerged from the court armed with a “Declaration of Falsity” issued by the judge against Mr. Evans, his ghost writer Douglas Thompson, and the publisher of the book, John Blake Publishing Limited, Sir Salman said he was “gratified by the results.”

“As far as I’m concerned that’s the end of the matter,” he said, making it clear that he had never sought any financial damages and simply wanted to set the record straight.

Mr. Evans, who was a member of the Scotland Yard team which protected Sir Salman when he faced death threats over the publication of “Satanic Verses,” portrayed him in his book, “On Her Majesty’s Service”, as “mean, nasty, tight-fisted, arrogant and extremely unpleasant.”

What riled Sir Salman was the claim that his guards “got so fed with him” that one day they “locked him in a cupboard under the stairs and all went to the local pub for a pint or two.”

Other inaccuracies included the claim that Sir Salman asked his guards to pay £45 each when they took some wine bottles from the cellar of a friend’s safe house where he was staying; and that Sir Salman billed the police for rent when they stayed overnight in his house.

There were also references to Sir Salman’s personal life and his former wife Elizabeth West that he dismissed as “nonsense.”

Some 4,000 copies of the book, which were printed but never distributed, were pulped after it emerged that substantial parts were untrue.

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