‘A type of slow death’: Elaine Stead awarded $280,000 in Financial Review defamation case
A businesswoman has been awarded $280,000 after the Federal Court found she was defamed by a “sustained campaign of offensive mockery” which amounted to bullying in a series of columns in the Australian Financial Review.
Elaine Stead, the former managing director of venture capital at the now-defunct Blue Sky Alternative Investments, sued the newspaper and Rear Window columnist Joe Aston over a series of columns, including one which referred to her as a “feminist cretin”.
Businesswoman Elaine Stead leaves the Federal Court last year.Credit:Dean Sewell
Last year, Justice Michael Lee found the columns conveyed a total of four defamatory imputations, including that Dr Stead is a “cretin” and “rashly destroyed the capital of business ventures with which she was associated”.
Dr Stead had also sued over a tweet by Aston in October 2019, however Justice Lee previously ruled it did not convey the defamatory meaning alleged by Dr Stead’s lawyers.
The Financial Review sought to rely on the defence of honest opinion in the case.
In a judgment on Wednesday, Justice Lee rejected this defence on the basis that “critical aspects of the facts” contained in, or referred to, in the columns “have not been shown to be true in substance”.
Justice Lee said Aston is a “talented and oftentimes highly entertaining wordsmith” who is “no respecter of persons” and his work is “no doubt often amusing” to his readers.
“But a writer targeting and addressing the perceived folly or sins of others walks a fine line,” Justice Lee said. “It is a line which reflects the tension between two important rights which the law of defamation seeks to balance: the right to freedom of expression and the right to reputation.”
Dr Stead argued in the case that Aston singled her out in the columns, and in doing so he did not merely cross the line, he pole-vaulted it.
Justice Lee said Dr Stead was “serially mocked” in Aston’s columns as “as being, in effect, a gaping moron”. This included multiple references to Dr Stead as “Brick Tamland”, the fictional weatherman from the film Anchorman.
The judge quoted part of Anchorman, where Tamland introduces himself by saying: “People seem to like me because I am polite and I’m rarely late. I like to eat ice cream and I really enjoy a nice pair of slacks. Years later, a doctor will tell me that I have an IQ of 48 and am what some people call ‘mentally retarded’.”
Justice Lee said Dr Stead was singled out for focus by Aston, who “engaged in a sustained campaign of offensive mockery which amounted, in my view, to a form of bullying”.
This “targeted campaign” was “unjustified and improper”, Justice Lee said, and meant the conduct of the Financial Review and Aston was “sufficiently oppressive to warrant some compensatory sum to be awarded for aggravated damages”.
Justice Lee awarded Dr Stead $280,000 in damages, including aggravated damages, with interest to be determined at a later date.
“Dr Stead was a target Mr Aston determined to ‘go after’ because he perceived she was not taking responsibility for her alleged failures at Blue Sky and because of her insouciance, as he saw it, to the losses suffered by investors,” Justice Lee said.
“The consequence of Dr Stead being targeted was that she did suffer a type of ‘slow death’ as a
consequence.”
The case will return to court on February 3.
Georgina Mitchell is a court reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald.