03/02/2020 Stocker v Stocker [2019] UKSC 17 (3 April 2019) fact that Mrs Stocker had said that her husband “tried” to strangle her precluded the possibility of her statement being taken to mean that he had constricted her neck painfully. 16. This approach produces an obviously anomalous result. If Mrs Stocker had said, “he strangled me”, she should be understood to have meant that her husband had constricted her neck or throat painfully, on account of her having survived to tell the tale. But, because she said that he had “tried” to strangle her (in the normal order of things and in common experience a less serious accusation), she was fixed with the momentous allegation that her husband had tried to kill her. On this analysis, the use of the verb, “to try” assumes a critical significance. The possible meaning of constricting the neck painfully was shut out by what might be regarded as the adventitious circumstance that Mrs Stocker had said that her husband had “tried” to strangle her rather than that he had strangled her. 17. This anomalous result was the product of confining the meaning of the words exclusively to two dictionary definitions. If “tried to strangle” did not fit with the notion of trying to constrict the neck or throat painfully (because of the prosaic fact that Mrs Stocker was still alive), the only possible meaning was that Mr Stocker had tried to kill. 18. On the remainder of the claimed defamatory meaning the judge’s reasoning was closely allied to that on the first part. In the passage of his judgment which immediately succeeded that quoted at para 14 above, he said at para 36: “That understanding [that her husband had tried to kill Mrs Stocker] would have informed the ordinary reader about the meaning of the remaining comments. They were that he had been arrested on at least two other occasions for ‘gun issues’ and for breach of a non-molestation order and possibly on a third for ‘threats’. In addition, he would have understood her to assert that the police believed that he had broken the terms of the non-molestation order; in other words, that there was a basis beyond mere suspicion for doing so.” 19. The judge then dealt with an argument made on behalf of Mrs Stocker that all that she had done was to state that Mr Stocker had been arrested on more than one occasion and that this was not itself a defamatory statement. Of these claims, the judge said this at para 37: “I agree that in principle the statement that a person has been arrested is not necessarily defamatory. But these statements, taken together, go well beyond that. They justify the claimant’s pleaded case that the reasonable inference to draw from the statement was that the defendant was dangerous, at least to any woman with whom he lived or had lived, that he was a man who tried to kill on one occasion, had been arrested for an offence involving firearms on another, and had given the police reason to believe that he had broken a non-molestation order made against him. To describe him thus was defamatory.” 20. The meaning attributed by the judge to the statement that the claimant had been arrested, in the context of the other statements, therefore was that Mr Stocker was a man who was dangerous to any woman with whom he had lived or might live. https://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKSC/2019/17.html 5/16