A majority of the court upheld the award of monetary damages to a high school vice-principal who had been defamed by three of his pupils through the publication of a digitally manipulated photo.

[1] The first student, fifteen-year-old Hendrick Pieter Le Roux, crudely digitally manipulated a photo of two naked bodybuilders so that it appeared to depict the school's principal and vice-principal engaged in sexual activity.

They therefore denied that their conduct met the element of wrongfulness required for delictual liability under the actio iniuriarum, insofar as they lacked animus iniuriandi (intent to injure the plaintiff).

[2] Writing for the majority, Deputy Judge President Louis Harms agreed with the lower court that the picture was defamatory and its publication wrongful.

It does not protect them in these circumstances where they foresaw the possibility that their attempts at humour might be perceived as insulting, offensive or degrading by the plaintiff.In this regard, Griesel held that the defendants' conduct did amount to an actionable impairment of the plaintiff's dignity.

Froneman and Cameron agreed with Acting Judge of Appeal Griesel, the lone dissenter in the Supreme Court, that Dey had not been defamed but that his dignity had been actionably injured.

The judgment attracted academic interest for its attempt to "constitutionalise" the common law of personality[6] and for Cameron and Froneman's revival of the amende honorable as a remedy for civil delict.

[7] However, several legal commentators were highly critical of the majority judgment,[6][8][9] including on the grounds that it neglected children's rights and the best interests of the child.

[12][13] The Mail & Guardian also noted that all of the justices except Mogoeng Mogoeng had expressed concurrence with paragraphs 181 to 189 of Cameron and Froneman's minority judgment, which set out that "It is not, and should not be considered to be, an actionably injurious slight to offend someone’s feelings by merely classing them in a condition the Constitution protects", as the students' image of Dey classed him as homosexual.