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Gately's record label files complaint about Moir column
Polydor Records, Boyzone's label, has filed an official complaint with the Press Complaints Commission about Jan Moir's now notorious Daily Mail column about Stephen Gately's death.
The PCC has now received more than 25,000 complaints about Moir's article, a larger number in a few days than the regulator has received in total in the past five years.
"The PCC is now considering this new complaint," a commission spokesman confirmed to the Guardian, but would give no details as to the specific issues raised.
No complaint has been received by the PCC from Gately's family or from other members of Boyzone, reportedly because they want to avoid being caught up in the dispute while grieving, but Polydor's is understood to concern the article's possible violation of clauses one and five in the commission's code of practise, which cover accuracy and intrusion into grief.
Moir's column was published on Friday, the day before Gately's funeral in Dublin, and was headlined: "Why there was nothing 'natural' about Stephen Gately's death," seeming to dispute the postmortem's finding of three days earlier that he died of natural causes, as stated by a court official on Mallorca. The official said Gately had suffered a pulmonary oedema, an accumulation of fluid on the lungs, and the police had said there were "no signs of suspicious circumstances".
A statement on Polydor's website says: "All of us at Polydor are shocked to hear the tragic news about Stephen. Everyone who worked with him loved him. Our thoughts are with Andrew, Stephen's family and Keith, Mikey, Ronan and Shane at this terrible time."
