After a lengthy trial that saw closing arguments presented back in July last year, Justice Anthony Besanko is due to deliver his judgment in the Ben Roberts-Smith defamation case at 2:15pm AEST on Thursday, May 31.
The judgement will be handed down via Videoconference, and members of the public will be able to watch via the Federal Court of Australia YouTube account. Roberts-Smith himself will not be in the Sydney courtroom as the decision is read out, having flown to Bali in the previous days.
Roberts-Smith, a Victoria Cross recipient and former SAS soldier, has been suing the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Canberra Times in regard to a series of 2018 articles that he says defamed him. As well as the papers themselves, Roberts-Smith has taken action against journalists Nick McKenzie and Chris Masters, and former journalist David Wroe. The articles alleged that he had committed murder and other war crimes during his deployment in Afghanistan.
Allegations reported in the newspapers include that he murdered six Afghan civilians between 2009 and 2012. Perhaps one of the most intense allegations involves kicking a handcuffed prisoner off a 10-metre-high cliff and into a riverbed, before ordering for the man to be shot dead.
Another allegation involves the shooting deaths of two unarmed men. The reports outlined Roberts-Smith ordering a junior soldier to shoot an elderly man, before shooting the second man – who had a prosthetic leg – himself. The reports go on to describe the second man’s prosthetic leg being taken as a trophy, with Australian SAS troops allegedly drinking out of it in celebration.
Back in Australia, the court heard further allegations of Roberts-Smith punching a woman he was having an affair with. The reports suggested this happened after an argument at Parliament House in Canberra in 2018.
Ben Roberts-Smith denies the allegations.
In the trial’s closing arguments made in July 2022, Nicholas Owens SC, the barrister representing the newspapers, said that “Mr Roberts-Smith’s credit is seriously damaged, if not irreparably. He was willing to come to court to give false evidence.”
Continuing, Owens said “He disbelieves his own case and needed to prevent other people from saying what actually happened.”
Ben Roberts-Smith’s barrister, Arthur Moses SC, told the court that “It is crystal clear, we say, on the evidence, that the award of the Victoria Cross to Mr Roberts-Smith for his acts of bravery during the battle of Tizak in Afghanistan led to a war of words against him by persons who were jealous and bitter over his receipt of that award.”
Moses went on to say that the newspapers, “jumped on the rumours like salmon jumping on a hook, and published them as fact when they were fiction”.