June Venters KC has has called for lawyers to be “properly safeguarded” after a litigant subjected two professionals to a “total nightmare” via email and TikTok videos.
Deputy High Court Judge Aidan Eardley KC recently granted an interim injunction against David Protheroe-Beynon after June Venters KC, representing both claimants pro bono, told the court of multiple instances of harassment.
The injunction, however, permits Mr Protheroe-Beynon to make further complaints to regulators or the police, which Ms Venters told Today’s Family Lawyer was “a failure of the system”.
Ms Venters said: “Just as we have a duty and a responsibility to safeguard emergency workers and NHS workers, lawyers also have the right to go about their business in a safe and untarnished way.”
Ms Venters, who qualified in 1984, became the first woman solicitor QC and then the first QC solicitor to get permission from the Bar Council to be both a practising barrister and a practising solicitor. Her solicitor’s practice, Venters Solicitors, was established in 1991. She is a practising barrister with three paper building chambers, and a door tenant with King’s Bench Walk.
Ms Venters described one of the solicitors she employs as having been “utterly terrorised” by Mr Protheroe-Beynon. She said she has also been personally criticised and reported to the police and regulators by Mr Protheroe-Beynon, despite having no involvement in his case.
Ms Venters (left) said: “Approximately two years ago, David Protheroe-Beynon was a litigant in person in a private law case in Manchester, in which one of my solicitors, who I have trained, who’s been with me for more than seven years, and who then had been probably qualified for about 18 months, represented his former wife in children proceedings.
“From the moment that those proceedings began, [Mr Protheroe-Beynon] has utterly terrorised her. He has sent email after email after email.
“I feel that our professional body has let her down, and to a large extent, I think the court has let her down.”
Ms Venters said Mr Protheroe-Beynon would “send extremely rude and offensive messages” to the solicitor, and later started putting videos on TikTok in which he called her “incompetent” and “dishonest”.
She added: “[Mr Protheroe-Beynon] also targeted me, although I haven’t issued proceedings against him, because frankly, he thrives in responses. He has denigrated me publicly on social media, and then he did the same to a barrister who represented his wife, instructed by the solicitor two years ago. She’s had no dealings with the case for more than a year and a half, and he has put messages out on TikTok about her being incompetent, and so on.”
Ms Venters highlights that Mr Protheroe-Beynon is “terrorising” two “young, relatively newly qualified lawyers, both female”.
The High Court judge has issued a temporary injunction, but another TikTok video about the solicitor and barrister has since been published.
Ms Venters said: “It is a total nightmare. He’s reported me to the police. He reported the two lawyers to their professional bodies. He has issued proceedings against both of them, money claims for contempt of court that were dismissed without merit.”
“Can you imagine the worry that it’s causing the pair of them about the progress of their careers? Every time this man makes complaints against a professional body, they have to declare it, and it’s just outrageous.”
Ms Venter told the High Court judge she was concerned about him reporting her and the two other lawyers to their professional bodies and the police.
She added: “I thought it came under the Protection From Harassment Act. But I was told categorically by the Deputy Court Judge in the King’s Bench Division that there was no action I could take to prevent him from doing so.”
“I want to say to the courts and to our professional bodies and to the police that we need protection. We are doing our job, which is an emotive, very difficult job, and we need protection from people who are making false allegations based on nothing other than than they don’t like the way a case has gone.
“This is a call to our senior colleagues in both the court service, in our professional bodies, and to the police to recognise this is happening, and to support us, and to prevent it from continuing, because this is ruining lawyers’ lives.”
