![]() There is something undeniably enjoyable about seeing well-connected wrong’uns take illiberal, punitive measures to defend their reputations only to find out that their reputations aren’t worth shit.Īnd yet, the failure of Roberts-Smith’s suit is only a partial victory for press freedom in Australia. Irving tried to destroy Lipstadt but destroyed himself. To say it didn’t go Irving’s way is an understatement – it ended with the judge finding that Irving was ‘an active Holocaust denier’, ‘anti-Semitic and racist’ and associated with ‘neo-Nazism’. It brings to mind the David Irving case in London in the late 1990s, when the cranky historian sued the heroic Deborah Lipstadt after she accused him of Holocaust denial. Let this be a lesson to litigious people: libel suits can backfire badly. He’s been morally and financially broken on the wheel of a staggeringly foolish defamation suit. ![]() The costs of the trial – estimated to be an eye-watering $35million – are likely to be borne by him. He sought to humiliate the papers and inflict severe financial penalties on them, but in the end he did that to himself. This was a defamation case: a civil trial, not a criminal one. Of course none of this means he’s been found guilty of war crimes. He said it was unproven, however, that Roberts-Smith assaulted a woman he was in a relationship with, as the papers also claimed. He also decreed that it was true that Roberts-Smith assaulted captives and bullied his own peers. The judge – Justice Anthony Besanko at the Federal Court in Sydney – found that four of the six allegations of murder made against Roberts-Smith were ‘substantially true’. Even by the standards of the imperial savagery deployed by certain Western armies in the post-9/11 era, it’s horrendous stuff. They said they witnessed Roberts-Smith kick an unarmed, handcuffed Afghan farmer off the edge of a cliff before ordering that he be shot dead insist that a Taliban fighter be shot in the back 10 times before using his prosthetic leg as a drinking vessel and order or agree to two murders as a means of ‘initiating’ rookie soldiers. ![]() ![]() His fellow soldiers relayed truly horrific incidents to the papers. It was the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age and the Canberra Times that reported on Roberts-Smith’s acts of barbarism in Afghanistan. Forget the Succession finale, it was the conclusion to this clash between a celebrated soldier and the liberal press that gripped Australians. ![]()
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