There they were beaming from the front page of the Australian Financial Review, PR man Tim Allerton and the take-no-prisoners lawyer Bruce McWilliam.
Both are on Kerry Stokes’ shilling to protect the interests of his media business, specifically at this point Channel Seven and its CEO Tim Worner. By the breadth of their smiles you’d think their pincer operation has produced superb results and that, as Arfur Daley would have it, the world is their lobster.
So far, the law part is going swimmingly with the lid clamped on anything from former secretary Amber Harrison that may upset Worner. On the other hand, the PR element has a life of its own.
It goes to show that the more lawyers, law and money you might throw at some problems, the less chance they have of going away.
The issue that Harrison has with the company’s chief executive is characterised by Seven’s lawyers as “a private law dispute relating to a contract of employment”.
Yet if you read her affidavit filed in the NSW supreme court you’ll see that Harrison had other concerns.
The Harrison-Worner tryst had largely been conducted from December 2012 while she was working at the Redfern offices of Pacific Magazines and he was running Seven at the Jones Street Wharf HQ.
Things started to go seriously awry when Harrison was transferred to the head office premises in October 2013. There she says she was largely ignored by the CEO, but heard “gossip” about his private life.
Between October 2013 and June 2014 her affidavit says her discomfort increased and she sought Worner’s help to be relocated “as the relationship became increasingly volatile”. He proved to be unhelpful and she became depressed and anxious and in the process lost about 20 kilos.
In June 2014 in exasperation she sent Worner a text after hearing chatter that he had slept with another woman. It has been redacted in the affidavit to protect a third party. The unredacted portion reads: “BTW ... Fuck me Tim. You are right. You are busy ...”
The next month she was advised that a number of unexplained expenses appeared on her corporate credit card, which she said was also used by nine other employees, making it difficult to reconcile the disputed amounts.
She agreed to repay about $14,000 and executed a deed of release. She denies the repeated accusations of Seven and its directors alleging theft of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In November 2014 there was another deed of release, which provided for payments to Harrison totalling about $360,000. Most of it was compensation for “alleged injury, including loss of professional standing and reputation, paid and suffering, stress and humiliation, and dislocation of life as a result of events during the employment”.
Some $150,000 of the total was to be paid in monthly instalments, which Harrison alleges were stopped four months after the second deed took effect.
In return, Harrison was required to keep silent about Worner and Seven. Apart from not being permitted to make adverse comments or encourage others to do so she was also bound not to “either directly or indirectly give any interviews to any medium or make, authorise or procure any public statement, publications, off the record comment, background information” about the company, Worner, her termination, employment, the relationship or the expenses.
She was regarded within the company as a loose cannon and Seven was paying top dollar to buy her silence.
So while lawyers and courts are focused on contractual obligations and deeds of release, this case is about so much more than that. It’s about cowboy corporate cultures, where extracurricular affairs are commonplace and where shareholders’ money is splashed around fast and loose, where staff are bought and sold.
Few enterprises are spared from this regime. It’s commonplace in the media, advertising, finance and politics – who can forget Karen Middleton’s article about the litany of inappropriate advances she endured during her career as a political reporter.
In corporate life affairs are as old as the cave and they are meant to work in a way that doesn’t become troublesome for the big bwana. There’s sex (for a while), then the increasingly demanding party gets dumped. If it looks like hell hath no fury they are terminated and their silence purchased; and if that doesn’t work they get sued.
Lawyers and forensic accountants are engaged to ensure that protected species and the culture in which they thrive remain protected. A bit of hanky-panky should not be permitted to disturb the corporate veneer and the upward thrusting trajectory of the senior lads.
What makes the Amber Harrison case so especially egregious is that a major media company is one of the protagonists, a company that has not shied away from digging and broadcasting the dirt on its own victims.
Exposing in 2010 the double life of then New South Wales transport minister David Campbell was a special treat, and according to Seven in the public interest on the tenuous grounds that the minister resigned after being caught on camera leaving Kens of Kensington, a gay sauna, and because he used his ministerial car to get there and back.
There was also Seven’s exposé of the sex life of John Marsden, the president of the NSW Law Society. He was accused of having sex with underage males, yet in the ensuing defamation case, the defendant’s evidence evaporated and the verdict and costs went in Marsden’s favour.
In normal circumstances Seven would have been into the Harrison story with its ears back – right up its alley. Now the shoe is on the other foot.
Harrison’s lawyer, James Catlin, described the interim injunction as an “asymmetrical gag”. In other words, his client can’t say anything, while the company’s chairman Kerry Stokes and director Jeff Kennett are free to sling as much dirt as they like – something that did not escape the critical eye of Justice Robert McDougall.
Fairfax and News Corp in their joint submission to the court as intervenors said that they should be allowed to approach Harrison for comments in response to the public attacks on her by Stokes and Kennett. That would be a basic rule of responsible journalism.
What Amber Harrison has done, wittingly or unwittingly, has exposed the whiffy undergarments of a large and powerful media organisation.
