Two west Cork shopkeepers said newspapers treated Mr Bailey unfairly by suggesting he had murdered Ms Sophie Toscan du Plantier, a court heard yesterday.
Mr Brendan Houlihan, the owner of a newsagent in Skibbereen, said people had turned against Mr Bailey as a result of the coverage. "People went completely downhill on him. He was branded for a crime which he hadn't been charged with," Mr Houlihan said.
He said he knew Mr Bailey had had his "domestic troubles", but that he did not think he would be capable of murder.
Mr David Holland SC, for the newspapers, suggested that Mr Bailey's arrest as part of the inquiry into the murder of Ms Toscan du Plantier would have been a subject of conversation, notwithstanding the newspaper articles. Mr Houlihan agreed.
Mr Houlihan also said Mr Bailey's assaults would not affect his overall view of the man "all that much", but said these incidents were almost an "everyday occurrences" nowadays.
Mr Thomas Brosnan, the owner of a supermarket, a B&B and restaurant in Schull, said media coverage had given the impression that Mr Bailey had committed the murder. "If you believed what you read in the papers, then you'd more or less say he was convicted," he said.
Mr Brosnan said he found Mr Bailey an "interesting" person, given that he too used to live in England and read a local newspaper which Mr Bailey worked for. Mr Brosnan said the issue of the murder was something he tried to avoid discussing and that people had an attitude to Mr Bailey, "some more negative than others".
