Gossip columnists have plenty of scope to dig and flay and insult, but the devil is in getting the details right.
“She was being serially mocked in Australia’s leading financial daily as being, in effect, a gaping moron. There was an asymmetry of power and Dr [Elaine] Stead was sufficiently astute to understand that Mr [Joe] Aston was ‘the one with the column inches’.”
That’s how Federal Court Justice Michael Lee saw it, and he awarded Stead $280,000 in compensatory and aggravated damages against Aston’s employer at The Australian Financial Review, Fairfax Media (now Nine Entertainment).
Stead had sued for defamation over a series of attack pieces by Aston in the Rear Window business gossip column of the AFR during 2018 and 2019. He had called her a “cretin”, compared her to the movie idiot Brick Tamlin, described her social media posts as “unhinged drivel” and gone after her record as a venture capital fund manager, calling her a “venture capital pyromaniac” who “set fire to other people’s money”.
