A senior editor at The Age said she was “totally against” the newspaper’s decision to publish an editorial criticising a suppression order which banned media outlets reporting that Cardinal George Pell had been found guilty of child sex abuse.
The December 2018 verdict, which was ultimately overturned by the high court in April 2020, could not be reported because Pell faced a second trial involving different allegations. The second trial did not take place after those charges were dropped in February 2019. The suppression order was then lifted, allowing news of Pell’s original conviction to be reported.
On the first day of a long-awaited contempt trial against dozens of media outlets and journalists for allegedly breaching the suppression order, Victoria’s supreme court heard the Age’s weekday editor, Selma Milovanovic, objected to an article headlined “Why media can’t report on a high-profile case”.
Published on 13 December 2018, two days after Pell’s original guilty verdict, the article was one of dozens published by media outlets in Australia. A front page headline in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph declared “It’s the Nation’s Biggest Story”, while other articles linked to overseas publications which named Pell.
On Monday the court heard that Milovanovic wrote an email objecting to the publication of the Age article, which was co-written by the newspaper’s former editor Alex Lavelle, the investigations editor, Michael Bachelard, and another news editor, Patrick O’Neil. All three are among the defendants in the case.
“Regarding the suppressed case, I am totally against publishing this story today, as I have said earlier,” Milovanovic wrote.
“The final decision, of course, is not mine, but I need to say this for the record. I am totally for a free press. However, I believe everyone should have the same legal protection when facing court.
“The person in question is the same in the eyes of the law as the wife basher today, whose prior convictions we are only reporting now – after the outcome of his current case. In the past decades, we have never argued otherwise.
“To challenge the suppression in court en masse is one thing, but to publish this ahead of this is quite another.”
The court heard that Lavelle responded that he was “very sympathetic” to her view, but that “one of the things that is different now is that the stories are everywhere and easily accessible”.
“We are not breaching the suppression order, just explaining why we aren’t reporting on this story.”
The trial against the media has taken nearly two years to begin after lengthy disputes between Victoria’s Office of Public Prosecutions and lawyers for the media companies. Lisa De Ferrari, SC, the barrister for the Crown, spent Monday outlining some of the various allegations.
Much of the day was taken up with disputes about the evidence put against the media companies. At one stage, Justice John Dixon expressed his frustration with the Crown, saying it was “unbelievable” that he still did not have a clear understanding of the evidence it intended to tender.
Lawyers for the media groups are yet to outline their case.
