A costs order in a bitterly contested family dispute between celebrity parents has been overturned by a Court of Appeal judge - who lamented how a well-known DJ’s change in legal team sent 'temperature of the litigation soaring'.
In Pringle v Nervo, Lord Justice Males said it was a ‘great pity’ that Liv Nervo’s change of lawyers led to new allegations against businessman Matthew Pringle. These included ‘reproductive coercion and controlling behaviour including gas-lighting, love bombing, blame shifting, future faking and financial abuse through excessive litigation’. This change of approach ‘was guaranteed to send the temperature of the litigation soaring and to increase the costs substantially’, the judge noted.
Pringle had been ordered to pay 75% of Nervo’s £514,000 costs incurred during private law Children Act proceedings in the High Court because of Pringle’s unreasonable conduct in the litigation.
The court heard that Pringle had been in a three-year relationship with Nervo, one half of the DJ duo Nervo. During Nervo's pregnancy she discovered that Pringle was in a long term relationship with another woman in his home country of New Zealand. The relationship between Pringle and Nervo ended three months before their own daughter, identified as C, was born.
The court heard that for almost three years, the parties and their lawyers had tried to agree on financial issues and how best to introduce C to her father. It had been a source of ‘considerable discord’ that Pringle sought to protect C from publicity on Nervo’s social media platform, which has more than a million followers.
Some progress was made to 2023, with the parties agreeing on a way forward and C meeting her father for the first time. But Nervo's approach to the litigation changed after she instructed new lawyers and she sought admissions from the father on entrapment and rape. Pringle rejected these allegations.
The High Court refused her application for a fact-finding hearing on the basis that it would be ‘devastating to both parties to go through’ and harm any prospect of future cooperation. Following a disagreement about contact provisions, Pringle applied to withdraw his application for a child arrangements order. This was granted but an order for costs made against him on the basis he had made it late and had not appeared at two separate hearings (he had a medical note to explain these absences).
Appealing the costs order, Pringle submitted that the High Court judge had been wrong to exercise his discretion and gave insufficient weight to Nervo’s own litigation conduct.
Lady Justice King, giving lead judgment, said the judge had failed to take into account the conduct of both parties and so had wrongly departed from the general principle of no costs orders in children cases.
‘It is clear that the father’s behaviour, quite understandably, remains a source of considerable bitterness and continuing distress to the mother,' the judge said. 'An order for costs however relates only to the conduct of the parties in relation to the pre-proceedings and proceedings and not to the events, abusive or otherwise, which led to the conception of C.’
