I heard an interview with her on R4 the other day. Apparently the Observer had printed the same story, which did turn out to be unfounded, but unlike CC they were not sued.
As I understood it, what she wrote was in fact untrue, but the judgement was that she’d had sufficient grounds for believing the truth of it, at the time that she wrote it.
While I’m not disputing the judgement, of course I was pleased for her, it does seem a bit odd that a journalist can print ‘facts’ about someone, that turn out not to be facts at all, but it’s allowed as long as they had fair enough grounds for believing them at the time.
As she pointed out in the interview, this will now pass into case law, i.e it will set a precedent.