Ben Roberts-Smith: I’m a war hero with a Victoria Cross!
Fairfax: Actually, you’re a murdering cunt and we’ve got evidence.
BRS: You can’t call me that, I’m suing you.
Judge: Actually, you’re a murdering cunt and they’ve got evidence.
BRS… Well shit.
I both am and am not surprised that the Ben Roberts-Smith defamation case has finally ended in him losing. The trial included some fucking ghoulish details (e.g. the one-legged man they murdered and whose prosthetic leg they took as a souvenir and drank out of; and yeah, I just saw a picture on Twitter of them doing the latter which I will not post or link to) and an assortment of witnesses happy to testify that BRS really was the piece of shit the Fairfax papers were painting him as. As an exercise in defending oneself against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, it was a less than epic success. So I’n not surprised he’s lost.
And yet I am, because, you know, he was military, and in this country that makes him nearly as good as a sportsman, but even more immune to criticism as Yumi Stynes found out a decade ago. (Maybe she wasn’t so wrong about his putative intelligence after all?) How very DARE anyone criticise someone with a VC, after all, he was SAVING THE WEST from those SAND DARKIES!… apparently by throwing them off high places much like ISIS did. Much as the trial looked like it had to end in Benny being told to go fuck himself, I equally wouldn’t have been surprised if it hadn’t. Would BRS intimidate the judge like he evidently thought he could his witnesses just by having been an Army Man. With a VC, indeed. Which… clearly didn’t happen, as the judge decided that, though Fairfax hadn’t proven all their claims, they’d proven enough that he threw the entire case out, and now Army Man’s probably going to be out several million dollars in costs and lose his VC as well…
He is going to be massively in debt to Kerry Stokes, in any case, even more than he already is. Cos this wasn’t even really about exposing a war criminal in some ways, it was about one Australian media giant taking a swipe at another; this was about Nine, who own those Fairfax papers calling out Ben Roberts-Smith, versus Seven, who own Ben Roberts-Smith himself. Cos after leaving the army, Benno found himself doing a business degree in the course of which he was appointed deputy general manager of channel 7’s Queensland branch, then its general manager, and then a further step up to Seven Brisbane, going from regional to state capital in only a year or so. Kerry Stokes, owner of Seven, is a multi-billionaire, so for him to cover Ben’s court costs would be fairly trivial for him… if, of course, Kerry chooses to do that. And if he does, he’s going to want Ben to pay that back somehow.
Either way I don’t know if this’ll amount to much in the long run; I’ve seen a few folks calling for a war crimes trial now that evidence has been presented which actually could send him to jail, but I don’t know… federal police have been on the case since 2018 but still haven’t done anything about it, and I do wonder if this trial could in fact prejudice another one, given this one’s already found that evidence to be mostly credible. Could that even affect another trial? I don’t know how these things work, obviously. But Ben’s kind of fucked in any case. La commedia e finita, at least for now…
