Nine has dodged a contempt prosecution despite publicly naming pro-Israel lobbyists who had their identities suppressed after complaining about an ABC radio host’s views on Palestine.
Antoinette Lattouf was ousted from her casual position on ABC Radio Sydney’s Mornings program in December 2023 after a concerted email campaign by the lobbyists demanding she be sacked.
In June, she was awarded $70,000 for her unlawful termination.
As her Federal Court hearing against the ABC started in February, Justice Darryl Rangiah suppressed the names of nine individuals who had complained about Lattouf.
He said there were safety fears if they were publicly identified.
In an email presented to the trial from-ABC chair Ita Buttrose to former managing director David Anderson, she wrote she was becoming fed up with the complaints two days into Lattouf’s fill-in hosting shift.
Nine published articles in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in January 2024 naming four of the complainants. It did not remove them until March 2025.
The complainants then urged Rangiah to refer the matter to a Federal Court registrar who could prosecute the two Nine-owned publications for contempt.
The contempt case was also brought against journalists Michael Bachelard and Calum Jaspan, editors Bevan Shields and Patrick Elligett and Nine’s in-house lawyers Larina Alick and Sam White.
On Friday, Rangiah declined to refer the matter for prosecution.
The complainants had brought a “reasonably arguable” case that Nine was in contempt, he acknowledged in his judgment.
But Nine had an arguable defence that the court’s suppression order related only to the names of nine complainants found in documents tendered during Lattouf’s trial against the ABC, he wrote.
Nine argued it had sourced the names from other material, more than a year before the trial started.
In declining to send the matter onto a registrar, Rangiah said the complainants could prosecute the case themselves if they wished.
“I consider the intervening parties are ‘the ones most naturally placed’ to conduct proceedings for contempt of court,” he wrote.
He ordered the lobbyists pay half of Nine’s legal costs, saying the network’s failure to properly respond to repeated correspondence from their lawyers was “discourteous and unhelpful”.
However, he did not order all costs be paid because there was no reasonable basis for contempt proceedings to be brought against White and Alick.
The in-house lawyers had no control over whether the articles were amended and there was no evidence about the legal advice they had given, Rangiah said.
-AAP
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