Former special forces commando Heston Russell launches legal action against the ABC and two reporters
Heston Russell is suing the public broadcaster and two of its senior journalists for defamation in relation to two articles which he says accused him of alleged war crimes.
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Former special forces commando Heston Russell is suing the ABC and two of its senior journalists for defamation in relation to two articles which he says accused him of war crimes during his military service in Afghanistan.
One article published on the ABC’s website in November last year claimed there was an active criminal investigation into conduct by the Australian Army’s November platoon in Afghanistan in 2012.
The article identified Russell as the commander of November platoon at the time.
The other article pertaining to the legal action was published in October 2020; it was headlined, “US marine says Australian special forces soldiers made ‘deliberate decision to break the rules of the war’”, and it was shared in a link within the November 2021 article.
The articles were written by ABC journalists Josh Robertson and Mark Willacy.
The court documents, lodged in the Federal Court on Thursday, claim the 2021 article, written by Robertson, carried several imputations that were defamatory of Russell, namely that he was “reasonably suspected” of committing war crimes when he was a commando in Afghanistan.
Russell claimed the story caused him serious harm by implying “he was involved in callously killing an Afghan prisoner during an operation in Helmand province in mid-2012 because the prisoner would not fit on a US aircraft”.
Willacy’s 2020 article included allegations about the November platoon, and they were “repeated and emphasised” in the 2021 story, according to the statement of claim.
“Russell has been gravely injured in his character, his personal reputation, and his professional reputation as a former member of the armed forces, and has suffered and will continue to suffer substantial hurt, distress and embarrassment,” the court documents state.
It’s also claimed the ABC failed to give Russell a proper opportunity to respond to the serious allegations made in both stories, and that Russell had repeatedly asked the ABC to remove the defamatory articles but the broadcaster refused to do so.
It wasn’t until two months later that the ABC amended the November 2021 story to include Russell’s specific denial of an allegation made by a US marine.
Russell’s lawyers first issued the ABC, Robertson and Willacy with a concerns notice on July 26 but the parties have been unable to resolve the matter.
The Department of Defence on November 24 last year made a public statement that it did not confirm to the ABC or anyone else that there was an investigation into the November platoon.
In March this year, the ABC said its internal complaints unit, Audience and Consumer Affairs, responded to Russell’s grievances. It concluded that “no breach of the ABC’s editorial standards was found and the story remains online unchanged”.
“A&CA found that a clarification note would make one aspect of the story clearer and that has been added at the bottom of the story,” an ABC statement said.
Russell said the ABC and its two journalists had failed to uphold the editorial standards of the national broadcaster.
“The ABC, despite accepting that the article contravened its own editorial standard of accuracy, has refused to take the story down and withdraw the serious allegations that it made,” he said in a statement.
The ABC did not respond before deadline for the weekend newspaper, but a spokesperson for the broadcaster subsequently told The Australian: “The ABC will defend its journalism on this important issue of public interest.”
Originally published as Former special forces commando Heston Russell launches legal action against the ABC and two reporters
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