Gina Rinehart’s closest aide has slammed Channel Nine’s prime-time drama series House of Hancock after it portrayed Rinehart’s late father Lang Hancock calling her a “slothful, vindictive, devious baby elephant”.
The executive director of Hancock Prospecting, Tad Watroba, issued a furious statement after the first episode aired on Sunday night, and said a personal appeal to the Nine CEO, David Gyngell, before the broadcast had failed.
“Mr Hancock never told Mrs Rinehart that no one could ever love her, or that her husband never loved her,” Watroba said. “The scene was made up and untrue. Her relationship with Mr Frank Rinehart was very loving, and her mother Hope loved her son-in-law also.”
On what was her 61st birthday on Monday, the Rinehart camp released an old photograph of a slim Rinehart at a charity event in the 1990s to refute claims her father had taunted her about her weight.
Watroba, who says he has worked for the family since 1991 and knows the truth, also denied the late mining magnate “said terrible things about his daughter’s appearance”.
The two-part drama, described by Nine as “the controversial and epic true story of the Hancock dynasty”, aired on Sunday night to an audience of 1.4m, which was enough to beat the Sydney siege specials on Nine and Seven.
Famously media shy, Rinehart came under more scrutiny when she bought shares in media companies Fairfax Media and the Ten network.
Late last year she quit the Ten board although she still retains shares in the company. Last week she started selling her shares in Fairfax.
The Nine drama, which stars Sam Neill as Hancock and Mandy McElhinney as Rinehart, explores the close relationship between father and daughter and how it fractured when he married his housemaid, Rose Lacson, 37 years his junior.
House of Hancock would have made uncomfortable viewing for Rinehart. When Lang and Rose discuss how he will have to sack her as a maid before he can marry her, she says: “You might have to sack me all afternoon.”
Scenes of her mother dying were overlaid with scenes of Rinehart enjoying her honeymoon in America. Watroba said the scenes were variously fictitious, unfounded, grossly distorted or “simply never occurred”.
“I know the facts, and this show has turned out to be a tacky grab for ratings, damaging the memory of good Australians along the way.”
Nine has not responded to Watroba’s accusations but producer Michael Cordell has said it is important to remember it is a dramatisation of events.
Andrew Bolt, the News Corp columnist and friend of Rinehart, leapt to her defence in a blog post headlined: “How can Channel 9 punch a woman like this?
“How many other women in this country have been subjected to the savage cruelty that Channel 9 has heaped on Gina Rinehart,” Bolt wrote.
“Yes, I know she is very rich. Yes, I know she is a conservative – a crime in polite circles. But she is also a human being. A woman.”
Some of the inaccuracies claimed by Watroba included:
- Despite the portrayal, “Mr Hancock and Mrs Rinehart had a loving, father/daughter relationship”, and were together throughout the funeral of Hope Hancock. To portray otherwise was incorrect.
- Rinehart was very close to her mother and did not continue to holiday or honeymoon in the US when her mother was dying as the show has suggested. There was no phone call to Rinehart to come home during her short honeymoon, he said.
- Rinehart did not participate in or condone doing deals with the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, nor did she or her father endorse a presentation to an investor group using a nuclear device for anti-environmental intent.
- Hancock never told Gina Rinehart that no one could ever love her, or that her husband never loved her.
