![]() “I’ve been reporting on Afghanistan since 2007, I’ve been there three times, I’ve covered the reconstruction phase of the mission and the mentoring phase of the mission. It would have hurt us, but not shocked us.” Take us back to the original investigation, how did you approach it? We knew we’d run a good case, but if we got a judgement that basically said, ‘Yes, you have run a good case, but it’s not good enough’, that wouldn’t have shocked us. “We always feel in Australia that the defamation laws are punishing, that courts are generally against the media. That’s not to say that we had a lot of confidence that it would work in a courtroom setting, because what the publisher of a newspaper could accept and what the courts will rule ultimately to be reasonable may well be very different things. But we had compelling reasons to believe that what we reported was accurate. “ Right from the start, Nick McKenzie and I believed our story – we had to of course, you have to believe your own story before you can expect others to believe it. We knew we had run a good case, we really felt our lawyers had done a fabulous job. “Beyond that, of course, we’re absolutely sweating on the judgement. Nick and I are both writing books, we’re needing to get them ready for the deadline – we’re not sure what impact the judgement will have on what we’ve written, or what we can actually publish. Leading up to that day, we had a lot of things going on. “We got the judgement early in June, and so that was a big day. To begin with, what have the last 12 months been like for you? With the dust settling on the trial, and as he prepares to face an appeal, Mediaweek sat down and spoke with Chris Masters ahead of his appearance at the Sydney Opera House’s Reporting for Duty event on July 30. It involved more than 100 days of evidence, 42 witnesses called in from around the globe, and hundreds of exhibits shown to the court.Īt the centre of it all were journalists Chris Masters and Nick McKenzie, and former journalist David Wroe, who had written the articles that detailed murder and other war crimes committed during Rberts-Smith’s deployment in Afghanistan. The year-long trial was the first time that any court has been asked to assess allegations of war crimes by Australian forces. Roberts-Smith has announced he will appeal the decision, but a date for the appeal to be heard has not been announced. ![]() In June, the Ben Roberts-Smith defamation trial against the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Canberra Times came to an end, with Justice Anthony Besanko handing a win to the papers.
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