Nine has lost a bid for a 50-year suppression order over a settlement it reached in a dispute with Ben Roberts-Smith’s former lover.
Person 17, who had an extramarital affair with Roberts-Smith, was a witness for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald in the former soldier’s failed defamation case against the Nine-owned newspapers. Her identity was suppressed by the Federal Court.
After the defamation trial, Person 17 threatened to sue the newspapers and one of the reporters at the centre of the case, investigative journalist Nick McKenzie.
In her evidence during the trial, Person 17 alleged Roberts-Smith punched her on the left side of her face and eye in 2018. Roberts-Smith vehemently rejected that allegation, and then-Federal Court judge Anthony Besanko found Person 17’s testimony was not sufficiently reliable to prove the alleged assault.
However, Besanko found some of Roberts-Smith’s behaviour towards Person 17 was “intimidatory, threatening and controlling”.
In a decision on Monday, Federal Court Justice Nye Perram said the information in the deed of settlement between the Nine newspapers, McKenzie and Person 17 had already “entered the public domain in the form of a number of news articles which were published” in May last year.
Perram said the news articles “reveal the substance of the contents of the deed of settlement”.
It meant granting the suppression order would “lack utility”, the judge said. He dismissed the application for the suppression order and ordered Nine to pay Roberts-Smith’s legal costs.
Nine’s application was opposed by two media outlets, Nationwide News, owned by News Corp, and West Australian Newspapers, which is now owned by the Southern Cross media group following a merger with Seven West Media.
Billionaire Kerry Stokes, who bankrolled Roberts-Smith’s defamation case, announced plans last year to step down as Seven West Media chairman this month after the merger.
Perram said Nine did “not seek orders requiring these stories [about the settlement with Person 17] to be taken down and it is likely … that they have been viewed by a large number of persons”.
“There is no evidence that these articles were posted in contravention of the suppression orders.
“Indeed, as the two media companies correctly submitted, the chronology of events on April 30, 2025 makes it quite possible that the information in the articles left the courtroom before the making of the suppression orders.”
Perram said an interim order preventing disclosure of the deed of settlement would expire after 14 days on February 16, unless an application for special leave to appeal from his orders was made.
If such an application were made, the interim order would be extended pending any appeal.
Besanko upheld the newspapers’ truth defence to the defamation case in 2023. He found to the civil standard of proof that Roberts-Smith was complicit in the murder of four unarmed prisoners while deployed in Afghanistan between 2009 and 2012.
The High Court rejected Ben Roberts-Smith’s last-ditch bid to appeal against his damning defamation loss last year, putting an end to seven years of litigation costing tens of millions of dollars.
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