Danielle Meagher – otherwise known as Danielle Collins, Danielle Meagher-Collins and Dr Botox – clarifies in one of her YouTube videos that she is a comedian. When you’re explaining, you’re losing. Comedians are supposed to be funny, but this one has brought only anguish to people who have already suffered enough. Last week, the Belfast High Court ordered her to pay £100,000 (€115,190) plus substantial legal costs for libelling Peter Jackson after his son, the rugby player Paddy Jackson, was found not guilty of raping a woman. Her abominable behaviour has resurrected that entire tragedy for everyone involved.
The late Madeleine Albright famously said there is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women. There ought to be an extra-special place for women who use other women’s adversity to feed their own ego. Meagher, who has been busy publicising her book, Diary of a Botox Bitch, has built a career on vanity, initially by injecting clients’ faces with dermal fillers and subsequently with her appearance in Dublin Wives, a reality show that ran on TV3 for one season in 2012. She says on YouTube she is a great-grandniece of Michael Collins who “was the president of Ireland”. Who knew?
The award of compensation for Peter Jackson comes nearly six years since he obtained a court judgment against the “Z-list celebrity”, as she was described in court, for 19 Twitter tweets deceptively suggesting he bribed one of the witnesses in his son’s rape trial and attempted to “pay the victim off”. Peter Jackson and his wife, Gay, were a constant presence at the nine-week trial in 2018 that triggered feminist protests throughout Ireland. They had the added discomfort of having to sit close to journalists covering it in the upstairs gallery of courtroom 12. All they could see of their son through the bulletproof window separating them from him was the back of his head in the defendants’ box. No matter how horrified those of us sitting behind them felt at the interrogation of the 21-year-old complainant by four teams of male lawyers over eight days, and her bloodied thong being passed around among the jurors, we could not but feel sympathy too for the parents of the four accused men. Anybody with a shred of humanity would feel sorry for a mother and father having to listen to evidence of their son’s group chats about “sluts” and “spit-roasting” women.
In September 2019, Meagher issued a media statement denying the libel and vowing to “fight this to the bitter end to ensure that the truth is told, and my name is cleared”. She promised – cynically, it turned out – that, if she won damages or costs, she would make a donation to a rape crisis centre. I hope no rape victim was depending on her donation, considering she had already failed to respond to Peter Jackson’s legal letter of claim in June 2018 and to enter an appearance after the writ was issued in March 2019. Not until January 2021 did she take action, when she applied to have the judgment rescinded, claiming irregularities in the service of the writ and denying she had written the posts.
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In December 2024, her solicitor asked to be released from the case after – as she said in her court affidavit – Meagher had stopped responding to her letters and phone calls seven months previously.
“There is no mitigation. There has only been aggravation, evasion and doubling down on the allegations,” master of the High Court Mark Harvey said in his written judgment last week.
Meagher did not show up for court dates on November 8th, 2024, December 2nd, 2024, December 13th, 2024, January 6th, 2025, February 5th, 2025, June 17th, 2025 or last week. She has addresses in Dublin and California and, according to Harvey, all “efforts to get her to engage with these proceedings have proved fruitless for several years”. He predicted Jackson faced “an uphill battle” to enforce his damages order against her.
Gay and Peter Jackson testified that Meagher’s tweets have affected his health, his formerly gregarious personality, his marriage, his ability to sleep and his way of life. He said he obsessively checks what Meagher is saying on social media and that he suffered a stroke while doing just that in August. He is not the only person who has been damaged. By making unfounded allegations about a rape case, Meagher has given ammunition to those who want to believe the fallacy that women are in the habit of lying about rape.
The Belfast rape trial, as it is known, taught many lessons. Such was the public outcry after it that the government in Dublin appointed a group to review the treatment of vulnerable witnesses in sexual offences cases. It recommended the requirement for defence lawyers to apply at pretrial stage for the court’s permission if they want to question a complainant about her previous sexual history. There are lessons in the Meagher case too. Had Peter Jackson chosen to sue her for harassment rather than defamation he would have qualified for civil legal aid in Northern Ireland. His solicitor, Kevin Winters, says there is no similar provision in the Republic. Speaking to me the day after a man was convicted of threatening to kill Tánaiste Simon Harris, Winters observed: “The irony is that in a criminal case like that the accused is entitled to free legal aid but someone who suffers continued harassment in the South must take a civil action with no legal aid.”
A case awaiting hearing in the Dublin High Court illustrates the point. The defendant, conspiracy theorist Gemma O’Doherty, cited as grounds in an unsuccessful application to dismiss the proceedings the plaintiff’s partial reliance on GoFundMe donations. The anti-vaxxer is being sued by a woman for using her 18-year-old son’s photograph to link his death – which was by suicide – with a Covid vaccine. As incidents of online harassment grow, the funding inequality in the administration of justice needs to be put right.
The lesson for reality TV makers is that there can be unimagined consequences from creating “stars” for no better reason than that they crave attention.
