Secret deal to avert Moira Deeming defamation case that could have saved Liberal leader millions
Victoria’s top Liberal was offered a $100,000, no apology way out of a heated courtroom drama – but now he faces a massive $2 million bill.
Liberal leader John Pesutto was offered a confidential deal to settle his legal case with exiled MP Moira Deeming for $100,000 and legal costs – without an apology – nearly a year ago but now faces a huge $2 million legal bill and calls for his resignation.
The Victorian Liberal leader, who could now be rolled as opposition leader, is facing a headline $300,000 damages bill, but the real sting is legal costs with his own estimated at well over $1.5 million.
There is also the looming cost of whatever the Federal Court awards him of Ms Deeming’s legal bills, estimated to be approaching $2 million.
The crippling legal costs he now faces will likely exceed a combined $2 million, with speculation his legal team led by Matt Collins KC will appeal the judgment.
Justice David O’Callaghan found Mr Pesutto defamed Ms Deeming by suggesting or implying she was a Nazi or Nazi sympathiser before booting her out of the Liberal Party.
The furore followed a Let Women Speak rally in Melbourne, which was gatecrashed by a group of neo-Nazi protesters that she had no connection with.
“It should never have come to this”
News.com.au has confirmed that the confidential offer of compromise was made to avert the expensive trial, where both sides ran up significant legal costs, at outcome Ms Deeming hinted at during a press conference after her victory.
“It not this should not have come to this,” Ms Deeming said at a press conference in Melbourne.
“I should not have had to go to court this. This could have all been avoided.
“I don’t understand the decisions that were made that led to this outcome. I had no other way to defend myself and to have these things retracted.
“I was never the aggressor. All I did was defend myself. You know, I refuse to give up my principles and my advocacy for child safeguarding, and I would have thought that’s the right thing to do.”
“No man has a vagina”
Exiled MP Moira Deeming told the Federal Court during the trial that it was completely uncontroversial to observe that women do not have penises and “no man has a vagina” – as protest leaders did at a Let Women Speak rally in Victoria she attended – on the second day of her cross-examination at a defamation trial in Melbourne.
Ms Deeming, a former Liberal MP who now sits as an independent, was suing Mr Pesutto for defamation over allegations he falsely portrayed her as a Nazi sympathiser after she spoke at a rally that was gatecrashed by neo-Nazis.
Rather than describing herself as a TERF, she suggested she was a “run-of-the-mill, middle-aged mum.”
As her cross-examination continued, she was asked about a rally she attended with activist Kellie-Jay Keen, also known as Posie Parker and Melbourne’s Angela Jones.
“It simply means that you don’t think any woman can have a penis,” Mrs Kellie-Jay Keen said amid cheers from the crowd.
She also went and waved at “the boys” – the trans people that had gathered beyond the police line to protest about the rally. She said it might make them annoyed.
“You understood, didn’t you, that she was being deliberately provocative and she wanted to go and make a spectacle of shouting “hello boys” at people who identify as women,” Dr Collins KC asked Mrs Deeming.
“She shouted about boys and about how women can’t have a penis. I put it to you, you know very well she was being deliberately provocative and trying to stir up the counter-protesters.”
“Monica Deeming grateful to God”.
In a statement, Ms Deeming said: “I am grateful to God for this outcome, to the Court for its careful and prompt consideration of my case and to my lawyers whose dedication, expertise and integrity is unmatched.”
“The Judge found that I was defamed in five separate publications and that each of those also caused serious harm to my reputation. Every single one of Mr Pesutto’s defences, failed,” she said.
“This judgment is a public acknowledgment that there was never any justification- legal, moral or political – for what the Opposition Leader did to me and to my family.
“The organisers and attendees of the 2023 Melbourne “Let Women Speak” Rally did nothing wrong and it is shameful that they were treated without fairness or respect by so many in public office.
“I will continue to fight for the rights of parents, women and children – and I know I won’t be alone.”
Judge O’Callaghan found Mr Pesutto defamed Ms Deeming in a media release, by conveying that she was unfit to belong to the Victorian parliamentary Liberal Party because she knowingly associates with neo-Nazis; in a 3AW interview, and in an ABC interview, by conveying that Ms Deeming knowingly associates, or sympathises with neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
The Federal Court found she was also defamed in an expulsion motion and dossier by conveying that Ms Deeming’s conduct in relation to the Let Women Speak rally warranted her expulsion from the Victorian parliamentary Liberal Party.
All of the defences Mr Pesutto’s legal team attempted to rely on failed. The judge dismissed Mr Pesutto’s suggestion that “on the whole, in the circles in which I moved including the more mainstream parts of the community I was trying to attract to support the Party (in my view, the vast majority), Mrs Deeming had a bad reputation.”
“I have no hesitation in saying that Mr Pesutto’s evidence at paragraph 45 of his first affidavit is untrue,” Justice David O’Callaghan a said.
“Having said, on oath, that ‘in the circles in which I moved including the more mainstream parts of the community I was trying to attract to support the Party (in my view, the vast majority), Mrs Deeming had a bad reputation, particularly for giving succour to hateful and/or extreme social or political views’, when pressed about the allegation, he was unable to provide a skerrick of evidence to support it.
“That is a shameful state of affairs, because the allegation – which went as far as saying that he ‘[knew] of no other person with such a bad reputation who has been allowed into the Party’ – was self-evidently calculated to defeat Mrs Deeming’s case that she had, or was likely to have, suffered serious harm as a consequence of the impugned publications.
“The allegation that Mr Pesutto made that Mrs Deeming had a bad reputation also flies in the face of objective facts.”
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