Dermot Nottingham outside the Auckland District Court in 2018. Photo / NZME
An Auckland real estate agent says he has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting an 11-year legal pursuit by blogger Dermot Nottingham, which has just been declared a vexatious abuse of process by a court.
"I wasn't going to give in to a bully," estate agent Martin Honey said in expressing relief at finally beating Nottingham in the Court of Appeal.
Nottingham is a former activist and blogger who at one time served home detention for criminal harassment of five other people. Their names were suppressed.
He was bankrupted in 2018 when he failed to pay costs after attempting, and losing, a private prosecution of Honey and two other people.
The legal dispute began in 2011, when Nottingham complained to the Real Estate Agents Authority, alleging Honey had misled the public and caused a loss to a company Nottingham was associated with.
The Real Estate Agents Disciplinary Tribunal ruled in Honey's favour, but this started what the Appeal Court called a "long-standing and tortuous dispute" that continued through the tribunal and successive District Court, High Court, and Appeal Court actions.
"It just goes to show what you can do through the court system – just keep taking things back to court," Honey told Open Justice.
Asked if the matter was now finished, Honey said there was always the chance of Nottingham appealing to the Supreme Court, "but good luck with that when you've got three judges slamming him like they did".
Honey said that years of being pursued through the courts had an impact on his personal life and business and caused a lot of stress.
"It's horrible. It's like your worst nightmare," Honey said. "And he said right at the beginning to me, that he would become my worst nightmare."
But Honey added: "I was never going to give in to him. It cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's good to finally be through it. You start to lose faith in the justice system but after I read that [Appeal Court decision] … I was really happy."
In the final Court of Appeal matter, Nottingham, his brother Phillip Nottingham and an associate, Robert Earle McKinney, sought the court's direction on matters to be considered to continue the case in the disciplinary tribunal.
Honey launched a cross-appeal, seeking to reinstate a tribunal decision to strike out the matter which had been overturned by a court. He won.
The Appeal Court panel of three judges – Justices Simon France, Rebecca Ellis and Rachel Dunningham – said the litigation had become an "abuse of process".
"The complaints that are the subject of the appeals in the tribunal were made over 10 years ago," they said.
"On any rational analysis they were never complaints of the most serious kind.
"Any harm caused by Mr Honey's acts or omissions, and there is no evidence that there was any, was minimal. Any actual harm caused to Mr Nottingham' business is also far from clear."
Referencing Nottingham's 2018 criminal convictions for harassment, the judges said it was difficult not to see Nottingham's continuing pursuit of the real estate disciplinary matter as further harassment.
"The use of litigation for that purpose is, itself, vexatious and an abuse of the courts' processes."
At the time he was convicted of criminal harassment, Nottingham was also found guilty of two breaches of suppression orders in a manslaughter case.
In 2020, he and McKinney failed in an attempt to sue Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and then director general of health Ashley Bloomfield over the legality of the coronavirus lockdown.
After Nottingham took the unsuccessful private prosecution against Honey, he was ordered by a judge to pay $117,000 in costs.
When he failed to do so, he was declared bankrupt in September 2018. He was discharged from bankruptcy this year.