Seven West Media’s chair, Kerry Stokes, has been ordered to pay $13.5m in legal costs to companies who were unsuccessfully sued for defamation by disgraced former soldier Ben Roberts-Smith.
On Tuesday, a federal court registrar ordered that Australian Capital Equity Pty Ltd (ACE), Stokes’ private company, pay costs fixed at almost $13.3m, and a further $225,000 in relation to the costs assessment, bringing the total bill to $13.5m.
In June 2023, Roberts-Smith, a recipient of the Victoria Cross, failed in his defamation case against The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and the Canberra Times.
He alleged reports from 2018 defamed him as a war criminal. Justice Anthony Besanko found the newspapers successfully proved – to the civil standard of the balance of probabilities – that Roberts-Smith was complicit in the murder of four unarmed civilians while serving in the SAS in Afghanistan, as well as bullying and threatening colleagues, and intimidating a woman with whom he was having an affair.
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The court order regarding the legal costs came five days after the high court ruled it would not hear an appeal by Roberts-Smith, and the federal court ruled Stokes would have to pay the media companies’ legal costs.
The former special forces soldier had appealed a decision by the full bench of the federal court in May to uphold Besanko’s judgment.
The total costs of the proceedings had been estimated at between $30m and $40m.
Roberts-Smith has consistently denied all wrongdoing.
In 2015, Roberts-Smith was appointed general manager of Seven Queensland, a role he resigned from after the verdict was handed down in his defamation case.
The ex-soldier had stood aside from his job in 2021 to focus on the trial.
Stokes backed Roberts-Smith financially and publicly, insisting his employee was innocent.
At Seven West Media’s annual general meeting in 2022, Stokes said: “Ben Roberts-Smith is innocent and deserves legal representation and that scumbag journalists should be held to account. And quote me on that.”
