Kathleen Folbigg pays tribute to Sunday Telegraph journalist Jane Hansen who helped set her free

Kathleen Folbigg, who spent 20 years battling to clear her name after being accused of killing her four young children, says Sunday Telegraph veteran reporter Jane Hansen “cared without compromising her journalistic integrity”.

Kathleen Folbigg, the woman acquitted of killing her four children, has paid tribute to respected Sunday Telegraph journalist Jane Hansen for her dogged commitment to the truth.

Ms Folbigg, who spent 20 years battling to clear her name, said Jane “cared without compromising her journalistic integrity”.

Jane, who died on Tuesday after an 18-month battle with an aggressive brain cancer, was most proud of her podcast Mother’s Guilt, which investigated the miscarriage of justice experienced by Ms Folbigg.

Ms Folbigg’s lawyer Rhannee Rego and her best friend and fierce advocate Tracy Chapman said on Wednesday they were extremely saddened to hear of Jane’s passing.

Ms Chapman remembers an important few minutes she shared with Jane.

Champion of truth, Jane Hansen loses her battle with brain cancer.

Hansen with her son Sam in 2014.

“In the raw interviews of the podcast there’s one where we ran out to the stairwell and she sat and asked me important questions and I was in tears because I knew we’d just pulled off what nobody thought we ever could.

“That was such a spontaneous and important few minutes. She was going to send it to me as so raw, but never did as it all got lost in the trauma and tragedy of that bloody tumour.”

It was Jane’s own personal tragedy of losing her baby - and empathising with women that blame themselves for the deaths of their children - that fuelled her fire to complete the podcast, right up until the day she was diagnosed with glioblastoma.

Being a health reporter herself and having written countless stories about the fights of patients against this hideous disease, she knew all too well the path that lay ahead.

Kathleen Folbigg, her lawyer Rhannee Rego and her best friend and fierce advocate Tracy Chapman were extremely saddened to hear of Jane Hansen’s passing. Picture: Tim Hunter

Yet she kept her spirits up, and her wicked sense of humour intact, right up until her last days when she was comforted by her loved ones.

“Jane put up an amazing fight right till the end and never once complained, and never lost her sense of humour this whole time,” her brother said.

He thanked family and friends for their “extraordinary level of support, love and compassion” for Jane, her son Sam and the entire family.

Former Sunday Telegraph Editor Mick Carroll said Jane was an “incredibly principled reporter”.

“She was tenacious and unbending when she was dealing with difficult stories,” he said from the Paris Olympics.

Colleagues say Hanson always made them smile.’

The No Jab, No Play campaign was one of her biggest victories.

“When she was uncovering the sinister tactics of the anti-vax movement she gave some horrendous bullying and death threats but she did not back down because she knew she was on the right side of right.”

Mr Carroll said that at the same time Jane was “incredibly compassionate and looked for stories which could help people facing adversity, especially those nursing ill children.”

A decade ago Jane worked together on No Jab, No Play, The Sunday Telegraph’s campaign to lift childhood vaccination rates.

The campaign changed the law in every state and territory and the Commonwealth, to ensure millions more children got lifesaving childhood vaccinations against whooping cough, polio, measles and other preventable diseases.

Also a former television journalist, Jane was the anonymous author of 2008 novel, “Boned” which “blew the lid off the blokey culture of commercial television”.

In a 2017 article revealing herself and Fiona McKenzie as the co-writers, Jane said she felt like she needed to “take a stand against” the “despicable behaviour of the men in charge”.