Erin Molan has won her defamation case against Daily Mail Australia.
The Federal Court ruled in favour of the journalist and commentator, and the online publication must pay $150,000 plus interest in damages.
On Tuesday, Justice Robert Bromwich found the five claims put forward by Molan were not found to be proven substantially true by the publisher, according to The Australian.
Erin Molan launched legal action again the Daily Mail last year, suing the publication for defamation after an article and two tweets by the publication that falsely represented her as racist over of her mispronunciation of Polynesian names.
Daily Mail argued that if the claims were true at the time, it showed that Molan demonstrated a “pattern” of racist comments during her time with 2GB’s Continuous Call Team program and that her attempts at accents were forms of “ugly racial stereotypes”, according to The Australian.
Molan explained to the court that it was “lighthearted jab” at co-commentator Ray Warren and she claimed the Daily Mail “distorted and misrepresented” what she said in the 14 second segment.
Daily Mail Australia
The Daily Telegraph reported that Justice Bromwich said he found the online article was: “not, in my view, one that was ‘tinged with, or even pregnant with, insinuation or suggestion’ going much beyond what was overtly stated, or such as to implicitly ‘invite the reader to adopt a suspicious approach’.”
“The June 5 online article was blunter and more directly critical. It stated what Ms Molan was said to have done, as had also been stated the previous day in the June 4 article, and reported on the reaction to that reported behaviour.
“The ordinary reasonable person, even with the propensity to loose thinking, would not, in my view, make the substantial leap of equating the use of the phrases ‘complicit in racism’ and ‘complicit to racism’ about what she was said to have done.”
Justice Bromwich said that most of the article addressed what Molan was said to have done and why commentators thought it was unacceptable. He noted that: “Such a reader would understand that she was being severely criticised… but there was no real implication of more than what was being overtly said.”