In 2003, American academic Rachel Ehrenfeld published
Funding Evil, a book about terrorism financing. In it, she stated that Saudi businessman Khalid Salim bin Mahfouz and his family provide financial support to Islamic terrorist groups. Bin Mahfouz then brought a defamation lawsuit in the United Kingdom, even though Ehrenfeld did not live in the UK, had never lived in the UK, and the book had not even been published in the UK.
The case brought to light has been coined as “libel tourism,” in which wealthy figures file defamation lawsuits in countries unfriendly to libel, like the UK, because their defamation laws are much more strict than in other Western nations, especially the US, even though the basic definition of defamation is essentially the same in the UK as in the US.