Editorial
Landmark court victory came in yet another case that should never have been heard
Just after 2pm last Friday, Federal Court judge Wendy Abraham ruled a series of stories exposing the gross negligence of Dr Munjed Al Muderis, published in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald and screened on 60 Minutes, were, in fact, true.
This was a significant result for the country’s biggest newspapers, but it was a case that should never have been brought to trial and the latest example of how a dozen money-driven defamation lawyers have made a cottage industry of extracting fees from rich clients only to score a spectacular own goal.
Some are no better than tow truck drivers sitting in wait on the edge of the freeway so they can be first at the crash scene.
They generate much of their own business by scouring stories about clients with money, whom they then approach with the double whammy prospect of a cash bonanza and the restoration of their tattered reputations.
One such litigator has made it their hallmark to fire off semi-literate correspondence to editors and reporters in the dead of night, perhaps to show off an after-hours work ethic, or to justify the already outrageous fees.
This is not a media sob story. Defamation laws exist to protect the reputation of people unfairly maligned. But when they are weaponised to strangle public interest journalism, painstakingly researched and fact-checked over months and years, society pays the price.
As big tech and the AI freight train further imperil the bottom line of media companies, the danger is that if left unchecked these lawyers will bully newsrooms into backing down every time they make a threat.
The Age, Herald and 60 Minutes have shown they will always defend public interest journalism, but other newsrooms cannot take on these multimillion-dollar fights.
The lawyers know this and extract settlement payouts using the threat of years of litigation that saps the energy of editors and journalists and their already tight newsroom budgets.
The Al Muderis case was the second major defamation action to fail in 2025, coming after war criminal Ben Roberts-Smith’s misguided appeal to the Federal Court. They followed Bruce Lehrmann’s disastrous loss to Network Ten in 2024.
As The Age’s Michael Bachelard points out, the result doesn’t matter to the lawyers – they trouser their fees and move on to the next case, while their disillusioned clients are left to peer into the abyss of bankruptcy.
In the case of Al Muderis, investigative reporter Charlotte Grieve was subjected to six days of cross-examination by Sue Chrysanthou, SC, often described as the country’s pre-eminent defamation lawyer, but whose success rate of late suggests otherwise.
Chrysanthou egregiously suggested Grieve was unprofessional, unqualified as an investigative journalist and had no understanding of the meaning of truth. It turned out these were apt descriptions of Chrysanthou’s own client.
When Al Muderis’ world came crumbling down on Friday, it was a fitting end to an action that was always outrageous in its ambition given the weight of evidence against a celebrity surgeon who had long courted the media to build his own brand, but whose gross malpractice left a trail of pain and misery.
It’s positive that our courts have seen the Al Muderis case and others for what they are: a shot in the dark driven by lawyers who stand to pocket millions.
If public interest journalism can’t be allowed to hold power to account in a free country, who will? The lawyers?
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