Judge Edward Hess granted a transparency order in Lauryn Goodman v Kyle Walker after the judgement appeared on the National Archives website earlier this week. Premier League footballer and England team Vice Captain Walker has been embroiled in a court battle with mistress Lauryn Goodman after it was revealed they shared children despite Walker being married to Annie Kilner, Walker fathered four-year-old Kairo and a baby daughter, known only as KW with Lauryn.
Judge Hess told the court ‘to anonymise or redact the judgment would have opened the court to ridicule’, during a financial remedies application in relation to Goodman and Walker’s youngest child.
The pair have been front page news as they went head-to-head in a High Court battle that resulted in a ruling declaring that Instagram influencer Goodman had used the football pro as an ‘open ended chequebook’.
The Mirror has reported that the social media aficionado took the footballer to family court over child maintenance but lost. Lauryn’s demands included a brand-new £70,000 Mercedes car, a £33,000 aircon unit and £31,000 worth of astroturf. Goodman has faced public backlash during the Euros this summer, with football fans branding her a ‘gold-digger’. Goodman allegedly had asked for the financial rewards to keep quiet about the baby, with Kyle later criticising what he called her “insatiable greed”.
Judge Edward Hess said of Goodman that she didn’t have a “good track record of telling the truth” and calling her “difficult, unreasonable and demanding.”
The court heard Walker say: “I’m not going to say I was over a barrel or someone had a gun to my head. She had a detonator. For me it was about keeping the peace just so my wife doesn’t find out. This is a woman who has had a lot of media attention over the last couple of months.”
The footballer’s wife Kilner proceeded to boot the sports star from their shared £3.5million home in Cheshire after finding out about his affair with Goodman.
Walker rejected the majority of his ex mistresses’ financial claims after the birth of their second child, who is aged one.
The latest judgment states that from the outset of the hearing, Hess received a request from three journalists to attend under the family court transparency pilot introduced at Central Family Court in January. Accredited journalists were allowed to attend the hearing and supplied with the parties’ position statements, the judgment states. Hess made an interim transparency order regulating what journalists could report in the meantime, with a view to making a final transparency order at the end of the case.
Judge Hess pointed out that Goodman’s prior actions were in contradiction of her pleas for personal privacy. He highlighted her attendance at the Euros with “her son dressed in an England football shirt with the name ‘Daddy’ on the back, and the fact that she was ‘willingly photographed’.
Lawyers for Associated Newspapers, whose views were supported by Walker, said Hess should allow the newspapers to publish, with some exceptions, information about the proceedings, including the judgment, without redaction or anonymisation.
He said: ‘Accordingly, I propose to make a final transparency order which (save for the few targeted items referred to above, allows reporting of this judgment un-anonymised and un-redacted and I will place it on TNA in its current form) does not interfere with the wishes of the press to publish such material as they wish.’
