This was the initial defense filed by Nine in which they denied having defamed me. Nine claimed that not a single one of the ten defamatory imputations alleged in my complaint were carried in either the 60 Minutes broadcast or the Nine article. Over Nine’s objection, the court agreed to hold a special hearing on meaning, because if Nine’s assertion was correct, there was no point in wasting time or money continuing the case.
The judge ruled that seven of the ten defamatory imputations were indeed carried by the broadcast, but that none were carried by the article. My lawyers believed the judge got the article wrong, and that I would have won on appeal. However, I ultimately won a judgment against the Age anyway, so there was no real financial upside to me in litigating the appeal. Also, I think my lawyers made an error in that they only focused on the print article and never mentioned the online article, which included a three-minute video created from the 60 Minutes broadcast. I think that had the original judge ruled on the online article, she would have held that the inclusion of that defamatory video to embellish the article made an otherwise non-defamatory article defamatory.
The main problem with my lawsuit against the article was that most of the defamatory statements were about the bank itself, and not me personally. Under Australian law, the bank was not allowed to file a defamation lawsuit. Even though I owned the bank, defamation against the bank did not legally qualify as defamation against me personally. In contrast, the focus of the broadcast was almost totally on me personally as the mastermind behind the criminal enterprise.
However, there was one part of the article that was definitely about me personally, but the initial judge got it wrong. The article reads as follows:
“Like father, like son
A dislike of paying tax is a Schiff family trait. Peter Schiff’s father, Irwin, is viewed as a martyr of the tax resistance movement. He ran a business called Freedom Books from a Las Vegas shop front, selling information packages that taught thousands of Americans how to cheat the system. He died in jail serving a sentence for tax evasion.
Schiff has inherited his father’s love of publicity. He spends hours each week recording his internet show, talking about everything from inflation and gold to the ‘fake news’ of white privilege. But while Irwin opened a bookshop, his son opened an offshore bank in sunny Puerto Rico – a US territory in the Caribbean which offers low to zero tax rates for eligible businesses and residents.”
It’s clear that “like father, like son” implied that while my father used a bookstore to commit his crimes, I used my bank. The judge ruled that the similarity applied only to our mutual love of publicity. But it’s clear that my love of publicity was related to my internet show only. The bank had nothing to do with publicity. It was my vehicle to help people evade taxes, like my father’s bookstore was his.
After losing the hearing on meaning, Nine submitted three “truth” defenses in which they alleged that the seven defamatory imputations carried by the defamatory 60 Minutes broadcast were substantially true. Truth is an absolute defense against defamation. So, even though the respondents defamed me, if the allegations were true, I would not have been entitled to any damages, and I would have been liable for Nine’s legal costs.
But all three defenses were thrown out by the judge as lacking sufficient evidence to even justify a hearing. Despite having been given multiple bites at the apple, Nine could not produce any evidence to back up their claims. Their entire defense boiled down to my public statements criticizing income taxes and AML laws. But they had no evidence that I actually encouraged anyone to break those laws, or that my bank failed to comply with them. In fact, discovery revealed that all the evidence they did possess proved that my bank went above and beyond to enforce the very laws and regulations that I publicly opposed. That’s why the “journalists” were not just guilty of defamation, but fraud!”