“I have been sent to Coventry by Noel Meade and Michael Grassick,” Chris Gordon, the Turf Club’s head of security, told the High Court jury. “I have been boycotted.” 

After what he described as a “harrowing” five and a half years, the ex-guard’s defamation showdown against the Irish Racehorse Trainers Association (IRTA) was finally in full swing.

The jury trial, optimistically pencilled in for a fortnight, began in early February before Mr Justice Bernard Barton. Marked at times by explosive evidence, it ended up running for seven weeks – even as the world outside began to close down. 

In his opening address, the security chief’s barrister Thomas Hogan set the tone for the jury. “Mr Gordon claims he was the victim of an orchestrated campaign of defamation by the Association. A campaign to present him as a wholly unsuitable and dishonest individual who shouldn’t be permitted to hold the position of Head of Security of The Turf Club”.

The stakes were high. Gordon had put himself out on a limb. He was suing the esteemed IRTA for damages, and aggravated damages, alleging that the organisation, led by racing luminaries Meade and Grassick, had waged a defamatory campaign against him, aimed at removing him from his job.

The purpose of this campaign?

Part one of Turf Wars: how a bruising rift engulfed the top echelons of Irish horse racing

Part two of Turf Wars: “We just don’t like to be treated like criminals”

Gordon claimed it was to undermine the anti-doping programme of random stable yard inspections he had unleashed in conjunction with the Special Investigations Unit of the Department of Agriculture in early 2014 in an effort to keep the sport clean. “I was trying to do some good for racing. An industry worth €2 billion a year with 28,000 jobs breeding,” the security chief told the court.

Certainly, there was evidence the round of joint inspections had put trainers’ noses out of joint. During a brief stint in the witness box, the renowned trainer and former jockey Gordon Elliott told the court that while he had no problem with Gordon, Louis Reardon, the veterinary inspector from the Department of Agriculture was “rude”, “pushy” and made him feel like a criminal in his own yard. Meade too had complained of a “little Hitler syndrome” among inspectors in an interview with The Irish Field in August 2014.

It was a major part of Gordon’s case that when trainer Liz Doyle first approached Noel Meade about the wrong document being presented to her during a joint inspection of her yard in March 2014, the IRTA leaders picked up that baton and ran with it for their own ends. This was denied. 

Gordon, a former garda superintendent, claimed in the fallout of the Doyle saga – in which her name had been erroneously linked to a vet caught with substantial quantities of steroids – that the IRTA defamed him repeatedly, with premeditation. This, he said, occurred in an interview Meade gave to The Irish Field, at the Keadeen Hotel meeting with the Doyles and Turf Club stewards, in complaints made to the Turf Club, and in a legal letter issued by Frank Ward & Co on behalf of the Association in June 2014.

Malice and qualified privilege

The jury was told from the start that the claims of defamation were to be defended on grounds of qualified privilege. This meant the IRTA did not have to stand over the truth of past accusations made against Gordon. Instead, the representative association argued it should not be held to account for statements, which might otherwise be defamatory, that it had a duty to make on behalf of its members.

However, Gordon’s case was that the IRTA chiefs walked into the late Frank Ward’s offices in early June 2014, fully aware that the misconduct allegations being made against him by the Doyles were without foundation. He claimed that regardless of what they knew to be the truth, the Association’s leaders instructed its lawyers to write a letter to the Turf Club accusing him of entrapment. 

This, Gordon alleged, amounted to malice. And malice, if proven by his legal team, would trump the IRTA’s defence of qualified privilege and go towards aggravated damages.

While the onus of proof was on Gordon’s side, it was still essential for the defence to show that the leading figures in the IRTA had stood up for Liz Doyle in good faith.

“You are very much in the public eye when training horses.”

Noel Meade, president of the Irish Racehorse Trainers Association

In respect of The Irish Field article, the defence argued that an unincorporated association such as the IRTA could not be held liable for the outpourings of one of its members. Meade’s interview had not been sanctioned by the IRTA in advance. For his part, Meade publicly insisted that his comments about the joint inspections had been aimed squarely at the Department of Agriculture and not Gordon or the regulator.

As the trial geared up, there was no shortage of legal firepower in the courtroom with both sides sporting two senior counsel – Tom Hogan and Mark Harty, with junior counsel Shane English, acting for Gordon; and two former attorney generals, John Rogers and Michael McDowell, with junior counsel Francis Kieran, representing the IRTA.

Meade rows in behind Doyle

In the first three weeks, Gordon’s legal team called a stream of witnesses to make out his case including his boss at the Turf Club Denis Egan, his deputy Declan Buckley and Department of Agriculture inspector, Louis Reardon. Most spent more than a day being grilled by lawyers.

Then it was the turn of the defence. IRTA president Noel Meade was the first witness to be called on behalf of the association.

The horse trainer from Co Meath recalled that it was at the races sometime in May 2014 that Liz Doyle first approached him to discuss her grievance against Gordon over what had happened during the inspection of her yard. Meade said he had no reason to doubt the truth of her account and was subsequently impressed that her story never changed. He said he promised to do what he could to help her as an IRTA member. 

On that basis, the court heard he and Grassick accompanied the Doyles to the IRTA’s law firm Frank Ward & Co in early June to lodge a complaint and seek an apology from the Turf Club. The letter also demanded an immediate investigation.

As a trainer himself, Meade told the jury that being linked on a lodgment docket to Nitrotain would be an “absolute disaster”.  

She said her mother had explained to her that tampering with a document was an old-fashioned Garda trick to get people to admit to stuff.

“You are very much in the public eye when training horses,” he said.

The jury heard he could not understand why the investigation subsequently set up by the Turf Club to probe the conduct of its own officials did not see fit to interview the Doyles.

When asked under cross-examination if he was aware that the IRTA, in its defence, was no longer claiming that Gordon did anything improper in Liz Doyle’s yard, the Association president’s extraordinary reply was: “I have to say I didn’t know that, no, I always thought we claimed that he did.” 

Meade still maintained that Doyle’s version of events was the truth.

“An old garda trick”

For her part, Liz Doyle had to face up to an epic five days in the witness box – a stretch that would charter the case into previously unknown waters.

It began slowly, when under cross-examination by Mark Harty she was asked why she thought Chris Gordon would try to beef up evidence against her by tampering with a document.  She replied: “He wanted somebody ‘got’ on his watch.” She said she believed Gordon had “egg on his face” because the Department of Agriculture had discovered a trainer using anabolic steroids which he, in his job with the regulator, had missed.

She said her mother had explained to her that tampering with a document was “an old-fashioned Garda trick” to get people to admit to stuff, a shortcut. 

Asked if she believed Gordon had a “cunning plan”, to Tippex out her initials on the docket and write her name on it instead, she replied “yes”. She rejected Gordon’s version of events that he had only produced the document in the yard when he was expressly asked about the purpose of the visit. 

“Your attempted character assassination of me will not change my story.”

Liz Doyle

She said she understood that Gordon had spent the past five years of his professional life under a spotlight, adding: “My name is worth everything to me as well.” When counsel suggested that her name had in fact been cleared in a matter of hours or days, she replied: “Mr Harty, my name has been in the clear all my life. It was in the clear before Mr Gordon drove into my yard that day and it is still in the clear today.”

As the exchange continued, Harty asked Doyle: “Why in God’s name are you happy to see that that man is still in a position where this is hanging over him?” She told the court: “Because there were eight people in my yard.” Those in attendance included members of her staff and Department of Agriculture officials. 

Doyle said it was her view that nothing had been cleared up in the meantime. She had still not received the apology from the regulator she believed was her due. “I certainly don’t go around making dangerous or reckless false allegations about people, I never would and I never will,” she said.

As the somewhat charged cross-examination drew to a close, the trainer told Harty: “Your attempted character assassination of me will not change my story.” 

And then it came –  an unexpected narrative twist. 

Asked by Harty to explain the essence of her complaint about the document shown to her at Fairyhouse by Declan Buckley on April 6, 2014, she replied: “In my view, it was the start of my realisation that there was a cover-up on the Turf Club’s behalf of what had been shown to me in my yard and it is my belief that if Mr Egan says that he was responsible for this document then it’s possible that he is involved in it as well.”

This was a brand new and very serious allegation about corruption at the highest levels of the Turf Club. But was it just an off-the-cuff parting shot in the heat of cross-examination? 

Avril Doyle takes the stand

The next witness to be called to give evidence for the defence was Liz Doyle’s mother, the former Fine Gael junior minister and MEP, Avril Doyle. 

Gordon’s side even made the suggestion that their witness statements had been coordinated – both were allegations the former politician utterly denied. She said as a witness to the yard inspection, she was happy to support Liz’s case. “But, no, I didn’t try to influence the Trainers Association. If my presence in Frank Ward’s office was influence, well hands up,” she told the jury.

Then under cross-examination, the ex-TD dropped a bombshell.

On week five of the trial, Doyle revealed a conversation with Turf Club boss Denis Egan that had hitherto been kept under wraps. If there were legal reasons why this information had not been previously revealed to the jury, Doyle was now being encouraged by Gordon’s lawyers to elaborate.

She said she first spoke to Egan about the joint yard inspection in or around March 31, 2014 and not – as the court had previously heard – on April 15. She wanted to know from the Turf Club chief what in “God’s name” was going on. By then Doyle had evidence that the document presented at Kitestown with her daughter’s name on it, was not a true copy of the lodgment docket found in the prosecution file of Carlow vet, John Hughes.

Discussing the discrepancies on the docket presented by Gordon, Doyle said she told Egan: “If there had even been a question mark beside “Liz Doyle”, … and the initials had been left on the docket we were shown, I would have understood why the seven inspectors from the two bodies arrived in our yard. I would have understood it but, Denis, it wasn’t. It was presented as a fait accompli – ‘Liz Doyle’ beside the ‘200’.”

By her account, the importance of this conversation would become apparent when Liz Doyle returned from Fairyhouse on April 6 with a torn and crumpled copy of the Hughes docket she had been given by Declan Buckley. 

She believed the yard inspection had gone wrong and “they were all protecting one another from thereon in”.

When lo and behold, this version of the document had a question mark on it, and initials, Doyle said she believed this was an attempt at an “exit strategy” by the Turf Club. 

She said when she next spoke to Egan on April 15, she asked him how he could have been so stupid as to have added a question mark on to the copy lodgment sheet used by Buckley.

Doyle was alleging a full-blown cover-up.

When Hogan suggested that her account of events was an “absurd concoction”, Doyle replied:  “I’ve taken an oath here, and I actually understand very clearly at this late stage in my life what perjury is and implication of perjury. So for you to suggest I have concocted anything is totally out of order as far as I’m concerned, that is tantamount to saying I am telling lies.” 

She told the jury she was furious that “the chancers” from the Turf Club and the Department had “tried it on” in their yard. She claimed the inspectors had attempted to entrap her daughter and bounce her into an admission of guilt.

Asked if Buckley at Fairyhouse had been the messenger in the second “try-on” in this elaborate fraud, she replied yes, that was her opinion.

She said she still did not accept that Egan had written “Liz Doyle?” on the lodgment docket on January 22, some months prior to the inspection. She believed the yard inspection had gone wrong and “they were all protecting one another from thereon in”.  

“I can understand that but I don’t approve of it,” she said.

The nuclear button

As the cross-examination continued into a second day, Hogan put it to Doyle that her daughter was never going to get an apology from the Turf Club while she persisted with this “preposterous conspiracy theory”.  He noted that the alleged cover-up was not mentioned in solicitor Frank Ward’s letter of complaint to the Turf Club in June 2014 and he queried when she first realised the Trainers Association was not going to stand over her allegations. 

“I am chief executive of a regulatory body and that is about as low as you can go.”

Turf Club chief executive Denis Egan

Doyle said the IRTA had been in lockstep with her and her daughter from the beginning and she did not accept that the organisation had resiled from that position.

Hogan argued the IRTA had made a clear climbdown. While the solicitor’s letter from Frank Ward in June accused Gordon of entrapment, legal correspondence from the IRTA the following October was considerably more muted. “The fact that your client was not aware at the time of the inspection Liz Doyle had been written in manuscript form by Mr Denis Egan of the Turf Club reflects poorly on the organisation of the Turf Club,” it read.

Doyle said this reflected legal advice they had received and the fact that they did not have a photocopy of the document presented by Gordon in the yard. She said she had been told by Egan that it had been binned.

Doyle claimed all of these issues had been raised during the Keadeen Hotel meeting between the Turf Club and IRTA officials in August 2014, including Egan’s involvement in a cover-up. Hogan suggested to Doyle this was implausible as it would have been a case of hitting the “nuclear button”. The former MEP held her ground.

Egan, who had finished his turn in the witness box days earlier, now had to be recalled from the Cheltenham festival to contradict Doyle’s account of the April 2014 phone call. Back on the stand, he joked: “Stay away from me”, before turning to matters in hand. 

He told Gordon’s lawyers he was flabbergasted to be implicated in a fraud and a conspiracy. “I am chief executive of a regulatory body and that is about as low as you can go. I am saying with absolute certainty I did not create a document between the time alleged by Mrs Doyle, which is March 31 and April 6.” His evidence lasted less than five minutes. Lawyers for the IRTA made it known to the court that they would not be challenging his testimony.

A new vista

In the meantime, Grassick, a retired trainer and the CEO of the Trainers Association was called to the stand. Like Meade before him, he set out to the jury why he believed it had been important to row in behind Liz Doyle’s complaint about the Turf Club. “We couldn’t ignore it because I mean obviously there was going to be more of these inspections, so I felt that we had to protect trainers for any future inspections, that they would have to be carried out in accordance with what we would accept as proper standards,” he told the court.

But unlike Meade, Grassick had to face a new vista of allegations, Avril Doyle’s belief in a Turf Club cover-up going all the way to the top. Under cross-examination, the IRTA chief executive said he had not taken notes but he thought he recalled Doyle raising the issue of Egan and false documents with Frank Ward at the June meeting. 

It was put to him by Harty that it was a very serious matter, not just one rogue official in the Turf Club, but a rogue organisation. Grassick agreed it was serious but wouldn’t adopt the word “rogue”. Asked why no alarm bells rang when the explosive accusation about Egan was not included in Doyle’s statement, he said he didn’t read her statement at the time. 

“We had misgivings of what was going on. That is why we wanted an investigation. We wanted to know, we wanted to hear either side of the story, what actually happened,” he said in his evidence.

Grassick like Meade emphasised the consistency of the Doyles’ account. “I have no reason to doubt them, no. Never have,” he said.

He recalled standing on his own drinking tea by the trainers’ tea room at the Leopardstown races when Gordon approached him and said of the jockeys in the weigh room: “They’re all corrupt”.

Earlier, the jury had heard Grassick and Egan had an excellent working relationship. They would sometimes speak two or three times in a day. The IRTA CEO again confirmed it. 

Harty asked him: “Is that your test? You will deal with crooks who you get on well with and you won’t deal with crooks who you don’t get on well with?” Grassick replied: “I think that is a terrible thing to say.”

Harty followed on with: “You are the person who is standing here to say you had a meeting with a woman on June 4 who told you that Denis Egan was falsifying documents to cover-up wrongdoing in the Turf Club. That is what you are saying, isn’t that right?” “Yes,” Grassick replied.

Despite getting on well, the IRTA chief said he never raised the allegation with Egan.

Later in his evidence, Grassick said it wasn’t until the Keadeen Hotel meeting on August 15, 2014 that he was told Egan’s handwriting was on the March 26 inspection document presented in Doyle’s stables. He said previously he understood from the Doyles that the head of the Turf Club had only been responsible for the Fairyhouse version.

Asked if he had made any efforts to clarify the Doyles’ story, he said he expected the IRTA’s solicitors to have raised any pertinent questions.

In the course of Grassick’s evidence, it emerged that he had an issue with Chris Gordon, dating back to an encounter in 2012. He recalled standing on his own drinking tea by the trainers’ tea room at the Leopardstown races when Gordon approached him and said of the jockeys in the weigh room: “They’re all corrupt”. Grassick said Gordon then added: “You trainers are the same, you are all corrupt.” The IRTA chief said he tried to avoid contact with Gordon after that as he thought he had a terrible attitude towards Irish racing for a man in his position. But he added that he did not want him out of his job because of it.

A public health announcement

By mid-March, an edginess had entered the defamation proceedings. Outside the courtroom were near-empty streets as Dublin began to lock down due to the coronavirus. Office workers had been urged to stay home and St Patrick’s Day parades across the country had been canned. On March 18, in the absence of the jury, Rogers asked Justice Barton whether the trial should be abandoned or adjourned on public health grounds. It was day 25 of the hearing. 

How was a jury supposed to practice social distancing when deliberating on a verdict, he wondered? Would they rush to their decision over concerns about the virus?

Rogers pointed out that Turf Club boss Denis Egan had returned from the Cheltenham Festival and had sat in the court “among a bevy of other, possibly just observers”. Supporting the submission, McDowell, also for the IRTA, said that while he would fulfill his duties as a barrister, he was facing domestic disquiet by coming into court every day.

Gordon’s side, however, was keen to plough on. Harty argued that as lawyers, rather than epidemiologists, they should follow government advice, which at that time was for no gatherings of over 100 people. “The Court, I am sure, may have listened to the ministerial broadcast last night from the Taoiseach where one of the most important things he said was that we should listen to the experts and not tell them that they are doing the wrong thing”. Criminal trials, he noted, were continuing. 

Harty suggested the jury should be spread out in court for closing speeches. “I am told that the jury room, in fact, is quite spacious and that there should be no difficulty there.” In response to Rogers’ concerns about where the jury would get lunch, he said if it came to it, he would pay for 12 sandwiches from the Centra 100 yards away on the quays.

Inquiries were made, arrangements were put in place and the trial continued.

Final arguments

In his closing address to the jury, Rogers argued that evidence of a sustained campaign or “vendetta” against Gordon simply did not stack up.

He said at all times when representing Liz Doyle, his clients had maintained an honest belief that something improper or irregular happened. He likened the position of Grassick and Meade to shop stewards trying to help union members and being held liable for their efforts.

The aftermath of the wrong document being shown at the Kitestown inspection had been “poisoned” by the unwillingness of the Turf Club and Mr Gordon to deal with it effectively, the court was told.

In reply, Mark Harty told the jurors in his final speech that it was open to them to find Gordon had been the victim of an orchestrated campaign, “Insofar as its aim was to take Gordon off the pitch, to remove him from dealing with trainers at all it was undoubtedly a severe campaign.” In this, he urged the jurors to mark their disapproval by awarding punitive damages to the Turf Club’s head of security.

He said there was one “crisp” piece of evidence that indicated an orchestrated campaign. Because Michael Grassick had never heard Declan Buckley or Denis Egan say anything that he didn’t like about the trainers in 2012, he didn’t pursue any allegation of wrongdoing against them. “Mr Grassick has made it perfectly clear that even though he says Avril Doyle told him there were questions to be asked of Denis Egan he decided not to do it,” Harty said.

Having been apprised of the law by Justice Barton, the jury retired with the issue paper at half three on Wednesday, March 25.

After four hours of deliberations, the jurors returned to court with a verdict. The jury found in favour of Gordon on six out of seven claims of defamation. In the seventh, Grassick had been cleared of acting in bad faith when he passed on to Denis Egan a complaint made by trainer Francis Flood over an inspection in his yard.

General damages were set at €200,000. On top of that, the jury awarded Gordon aggravated and exemplary damages amounting to €100,000.

Justice Barton thanked the jury members for their diligence, informing them that nearly all the criminal trials had collapsed because jurors decided they couldn’t attend because of the coronavirus.

For Gordon, it was a stunning victory. The 60-year-old had been veritably vindicated, even if he had paid a high price to get there both personally and professionally. He remains head of security with the Turf Club’s successor, the Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board. 

However, the joint inspections he championed to curb the use of performance-enhancing drugs in the sport are, for now, history.