Jeremy Vine was paid £600k by Joey Barton after 'bike nonce' posts, presenter confirms
The host confirmed that the former footballer had paid him the massive sum after the defamatory posts on Twitter
Jeremy Vine has received more than £600,000 from former footballer Joey Barton after he sued him for calling him a 'bike nonce' on Twitter.
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Vine, 60, sued Barton after the former Manchester City midfielder published a series of defamatory social media posts about him.
The broadcaster won the case in June last year and Barton was ordered to pay £75,000 in damages and then a further £35,000 as part of a separate settlement for claims published.
But Vine has now told reporters that the final cost to Barton was actually far higher at £600,000 after he pursued the recovery of his own legal costs in bringing the libel action.
Vine said: "At the beginning, I thought, 'this is libel, I'm going to go as far as I can'.
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"The costs racked up and then I won, he apologised, although in a very churlish way - dropped an apology on Twitter 10 minutes before the election result last year, so he knew that I would have my mind on other things.
"And then of course he said, 'I'm not paying the costs', so we had to take out a separate case on the costs. So the cost to him all up in my case was £600,000."
Last month, Barton was handed a six-month suspended sentence for sending "grossly offensive" social media posts about Vine and TV football pundits Lucy Ward and Eni Aluko.
The broadcaster told Ros Atkins that he had not realised Barton may have broken the law when he decided to sue him for libel last year, adding that he believes Barton's posts, which included calls for people to call the police if they saw him cycling near a primary school, could have put him in danger.
He said: "It only needs one person with a knife and, genuinely, what Barton said about me will have put me in danger, without any question at all."
Vine also likened the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), where Barton published the posts, to "a cancer" and said he is tempted to come off social media altogether.
He said: "One of my listeners rang the other day, and this is a comment I think I'm going to remember for the rest of my life, he said: 'The thing is, social media is the new asbestos, and in 20 years' time, they're going to be ripping it out of walls and ceilings'. And that's so true."