Wilkinson v Downton
Background. Thomas Wilkinson was the landlord of the Albion public house in Limehouse, London. A regular customer of the public house, named Mr Downton, decided to play a practical joke on Wilkinson's wife. When Mr Wilkinson went to see the races in Harlow, Essex, he left his wife to manage the house. Downton approached Mrs Wilkinson and told her, falsely, that her husband had been seriously injured in an accident. He said that Mr Wilkinson had suffered two broken legs, and was lying at The Elms in Leytonstone. He told Mrs Wilkinson that she should go  to her husband in a cab and bring two pillows to carry him home. The effect of Downton's false statement to Mrs Wilkinson was a violent shock to her nervous system, causing her to vomit and for her hair to turn white and other more serious and permanent physical consequences which at one point threatened her reason, and entailing weeks of suffering and incapacity to her as well as expense to her husband for medical treatment. These consequences were not in any way the result of a history of bad health or weakness of constitution; nor was there any  evidence of predisposition to nervous shock or any other idiosyncrasy. Mrs Wilkinson sued on an action on the case. Opinion of the Court. Mr Justice Wright held that Mrs Wilkinson had a valid claim for the intentional infliction of mental shock, and awarded her £100. She was entitled to a small claim for 1s 10½d for the cost of railway fares of persons sent by the plaintiff to Leytonstone in obedience to the false statement. As to this 1s 10½d expended in railway fares on the faith of the defendant's statement, the statement was a misrepresentation intended to  be acted on to the damage of the plaintiff. Furthermore, Wright J observed that since there was no physical touching there could be no grounds for a claim in battery, and as Mrs Wilkinson did not apprehend any immediate physical violence, no claim would lie in common law assault. He gave two requirements for an action in nervous shock, basing it on the "physical" harm that flowed from the shock. The defendant has to have wilfully done an act "calculated to cause physical harm to the plaintiff". And the defendant has to have in fact caused physical harm to the  plaintiff. The degree of intention is not read narrowly. The question is "whether the defendant's act was so plainly calculated to produce some effect of the kind which was produced." Subsequent case law. The reasoning in "Wilkinson" was upheld by the Court of Appeal of England and Wales in 1919 in "Janvier v Sweeney". During the First World War, Mlle Janvier lived as a paid companion in a house in Mayfair, London, and corresponded with her German lover who was interned as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man. Sweeney was a private detective who wanted secretly to  obtain some of her employer's documents and sent his assistant to induce her to co-operate by pretending to be from Scotland Yard and saying that the authorities wanted her because she was corresponding with a German spy. Mlle Janvier suffered severe nervous shock from which she took a long time to recover. The jury awarded her £250. The House of Lords later summarized the nature of the tort in "Wainwright v Home Office", a case concerning a young man with cerebral palsy who had been strip-searched before visiting his brother in prison. Lord Hoffmann, in his  speech, declared that "It does not provide a remedy for distress which does not amount to recognized psychiatric injury and so far as there may be a tort of intention under which such damage is recoverable, the necessary intention was not established. I am also in complete agreement ... that "Wilkinson v Downton" has nothing to do with trespass to the person." In 2015, the United Kingdom Supreme Court reviewed the jurisprudence surrounding "Wilkinson", in the case "Rhodes" "v OPO"  UKSC 32 and held that it could not be used to override the freedom to report the truth. In the  leading judgment, Lady Hale and Lord Toulson stated that, with respect to the intention to cause harm: In his concurring judgment, Lord Neuberger gave guidance as to when a statement which causes distress to a claimant would be considered to be actionable: Lord Neuberger also noted in obiter that: