Ashurst Australia comes up against a fiesty anti-nuclear campaigner and her websites ... 75-year-old pensioner sticks to her guns, while Fairfax takes down offending article ... Dealing with lawyers' letters
IN February we reported that crack legal teams had been working overtime to settle a defamation complaint against Fairfax Media and ace Sydney Morning Herald business reporter Michael West.
The complaint came from well-regarded Ashurst partner Sophie Dawson who, in turn, spends a lot of her fee-earning moments defending what passes for journalism in The Daily Ruperts.
Dawson was upset by West's article of December 19, 2012, Anti-nuke campaigner braces for legal blast.
We reported that West criticised a letter of demand Dawson wrote to anti-nuclear campaigner Ms Noel Wauchope, a 75-year-old pensioner, on behalf of client uranium company Paladin Energy and Paladin's general manager of international affairs, Greg Walker.
West had given Dawson an opportunity to comment, but none was forthcoming, and his article had been legalled by Johnson Winter Slattery.
Wauchope claimed on her website that Paladin had breached a "social responsibility" agreement with the community at Karonga in Malawi, where it was mining uranium.
Dawson's letter of demand claimed that an article, Australian uranium company Paladin and its mess-up in Malawi posted on the website http://antinuclear.net was defamatory of her clients, was false and should be removed from the internet, and a correction and grovel be published.
She added:
"Please note that you must not publish this letter or its contents to any person or in any form, except to your legal advisors on a confidential basis."
West said that Dawson's missive was an attempt to muzzle criticism.
It came hard on the heels of another Ashurst partner Robert Todd's heavy-handed letter of demand to farmer Bruce Robertson on behalf of client Grid Australia.
Robertson had attributed the increase in power prices to the industry's ''gold-plating'' of infrastructure, dodgy forecasts and other misleading claims, such as "rigorous reliability settings".
Todd's client wanted Robertson to stop making these claims, to remove his submission to a Senate inquiry from his website, apologise and pay costs - otherwise litigation might ensue.
Not long after, the chairman of Grid Australia made a grovelling apology to Bruce Robertson.
The ABC's Australia Story aired a program last month about aspects of this saga.
Dawson thought that West's article suggested she had behaved improperly in making demands on Ms Wauchope. Apparently, she did not know that Wauchope was a 75-year-old pensioner.
Peter Bartlett from Minters and John Pavlakis from Ashurst hammered out a deed of release, whereby Fairfax agreed to grovel and take down West's article from all its online sites.
Fairfax signed it, but West refused.
And, here's the rub.
A pile of anti-Paladin reports remain on Wauchope's anti-nuclear websites along with West's original report on Dawson's letter of demand.
West's article is also on a number other websites, including Change.org, The Australian Dairy Farmer and business news website Martin Frost - among others.
On February 25, 2013, Ashurst again wrote to Wauchope asking her to take down West's article and pointing out that Fairfax has removed it from all its websites.
There was another letter on August 27, in which Dawson responded to an invitation from Wauchope to write a response.
Again on September 18, Wauchope received another missive from Ashurst:
"Thank you for publishing Ms Dawson's response on your websites.
However, it has come to our attention that the original article is now appearing on your websites without the response being included prominently in conjunction with it: http://nuclear-news.net/2013/09/02/legal-firm-ashurst-threatening-australian-nuclearuranium-critic/ and http://antinuclear.net/2013/09/02/ashurst-paladin-attack-this-website-with-legal-threats/.
Please can you ensure that Ms Dawson's response is included wherever the original article appears at all times.
Please let us know once this has occurred."
She did that, adding an editor's note:
"I don't understand why Fairfax withdrew the article from their online publication, as I thought that the article was true. I understand that the journalist who wrote that article stands by the story and has not accepted the claims made by Ashurst. I am posting below, the article in question, published earlier on this website."
There are some further feisty reader comments about Ashurst's client Paladin.
So while Fairfax withdrew and apologised, the 75-year-old pensioner didn't, West didn't and the material is still out there.
So much for settling defamation claims in the internet age.