Tamborine Mountain State High principal Tracey Brose suing Donna Baluskas for defamation
A parent being sued for defamation by a Gold Coast high school principal has been grilled in court about an email she sent to the teacher’s lawyers in 2017 that read: “Best your client prepares herself for what we have in store for her next”.
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A PARENT being sued for defamation by a Gold Coast high school principal threatened ‘we are not done with her yet’, a court has been told.
Long-serving Tamborine Mountain State High principal Tracey Brose has launched a landmark $1 million dollar lawsuit against parents who allegedly defamed her in social media posts after she was mysteriously suspended from duty in February 2016.
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Mrs Brose was allegedly called an ‘evil, nasty woman’ and a ‘lying, manipulative bully’ in posts on Facebook and a Change.org petition aimed at having the principal reinstated, according to court documents.
Mrs Brose was reinstated in June 2016 but the reasons for her suspension have never been publicly revealed.
In a defamation trial in Southport District Court, one of the parents, Donna Baluskas, was today cross-examined about an email sent to Mrs Brose’s lawyers in July 2017.
The court heard the email read: “Best your client prepares herself for what we have in store for her next because we are not done with her yet.”
Mrs Brose’s barrister, Holly Blattman, asked Mrs Baluskas what she meant by the warning.
Mrs Baluskas said she intended to go to the media after the trial ‘to tell them the truth’.
The court has heard Mrs Baluskas’s 12-year-old son tried to take his own life after being expelled by Mrs Brose in 2014 over a school bus incident where he allegedly asked a boy, 5, to show his penis.
Ms Blattman cited a number of alleged incidents she said showed ‘malice’ towards her client by Mrs Baluskas and her husband Miguel who is also being sued.
They included a courthouse confrontation last year when Mrs Baluskas allegedly made ‘pig-snorting noises’ at Mrs Brose and told her: “You better watch your back.”
An angry Mrs Baluskas said it was ‘lies’.
“I am not a pig-snorter,” she said.
Asked by Mrs Blattman if she associated Mrs Brose with a pig, Mrs Baluskas said: “I associate Mrs Brose with what I said in my (social media) comments as a result of what she did to my son.”
Mrs Baluskas also denied putting pieces of paper with the words ‘wink, wink’ in Mrs Brose’s letterbox.
“I’m not that childish - that’s just stupid, immature behaviour,” Mrs Baluskas responded.
She also rejected Ms Blattman’s suggestion that Mrs Brose had never called Mrs Baluskas’s son a ‘sexual predator’ in a meeting with her and her husband at the school.
“Mrs Brose stood over us like we were a piece of dirt and labelled him that (a sexual predator),” Mrs Baluskas told the court.
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