After losing a defamation case launched by Sky News broadcaster Erin Molan and being ordered to pay her $150,000 plus interest in damages, The Daily Mail Australia is filing an appeal to overturn the win.
The defamation case stems from an article and two tweets published by The Daily Mail that accused Molan of appearing to mock Polynesian names on Radio 2GB in 2020.
A notice of appeal was lodged in the federal court on Tuesday with The Daily Mail saying that Justice Robert Bromwich erred on 13 points and the damages awarded to Molan were “manifestly excessive”.
After the case was won, the managing director of Daily Mail Australia, Peter Holder, said the company was “very disappointed”.
“It is also worth noting the court further held that while the Daily Mail article did not call Ms Molan a racist and that it was therefore not appropriate to make any determination on that issue, by reason of her ‘intemperate behaviour’ in prior broadcasts – including faking accents and arguably advancing racial stereotypes – she was at ‘some peril’ of an adverse conclusion,” he said.
During the case, Molan stated in her evidence that the broadcast on 2GB had nothing to do with mocking someone’s name and ethnicity and that “it was a running joke on the show to attempt to do accents from all over the world”.
Judge Bromwich in his judgement found that Molan was not mocking a Polynesian accent on the radio program but rather putting on an accent of her colleague Ray Warren, who had stumbled over the names.
Bromwich stated that each side “had a measure of success and a measure of failure”.
Interestingly, Judge Bromwich in his decision said that Molan would have caused offence to Polynesian or Pacific Islander people and found her to have been “ignorant or thoughtless” in saying those words live on 2GB.
But he found that “the most serious pleaded imputation”, that Molan is racist, was not conveyed.