By Perry Duffin
A design firm boss is dragging his siblings through court over a barrage of explosive emails in which they called him a serial child rapist and a junkie in a spectacular family conflagration that has ensnared the city’s councils, lawyers and top defamation silks.
Farah Georges, co-founder and director of the architecture firm Design Cubicle, was one of many cc’ed on the emails that began hitting inboxes in April 2022.
Farah Georges in the closing days of his defamation trial against his brothers this month.Credit: Kate Geraghty
“I will also FINALLY be commencing criminal proceedings against Farah Georges for sexual and physical abuse towards me as a child,” one email read.
“The trauma over all these years has been held in to not embarrass my family. Now it’s time.”
The author was Farah’s brother, Bassam Georges.
Farah Georges strenuously denies the allegations and is now suing Bassam and a second brother, George, for defamation.
Bassam’s emails allege Farah had sexually abused other children, too, including their sister Bernadette, on countless occasions beneath the family’s Merrylands home in the 1980s.
‘The trauma over all these years has been held in to not embarrass my family. Now it’s time.’
Bassam Georges
Farah fired an email back, calling Bassam a “transgender Judas” and accusing him of manipulating their parents, abusing his position in a government job and other crimes.
The abuse flooded back and forth for days between Bassam and Farah – and the list of names included in the emails was also growing – but this type of talk was nothing new for the Georges.
It was very new, however, for Zak Tayyar, Farah’s solicitor in a case over a small debt involving one of the brothers.
“Are you aware Farah ... is supplying illegal drugs to Zak Tayyar,” Bassam wrote in the original email.
Tayyer’s office at Armstrong Legal had been cc’ed in, too.
“Is it true Farah Georges was paying you by supplying you with cocaine?” Farah’s barrister, Dauid Sibtain, SC, asked the solicitor during the defamation trial at Downing Centre District Court.
“No,” Tayyar said.
‘Humiliating’
Tayyar on Monday told the court the email had triggered internal questioning from his bosses and that they had ultimately undermined his position in the firm.
Zak Tayyar, of Armstrong Legal, arrives at court last week.Credit: Kate Geraghty
It was “humiliating, disturbing” and something Tayyar had never experienced in 20 years of practice, he told the court.
Meanwhile, builder George had taken up the cudgels against Farah in a 2022 email chain.
“You sent hitmen to one of my cafes in Merrylands who broke the shop up and caused people to flee for their lives,” George accused Farah in one widely distributed message.
Almost every western Sydney council had been included in the spiralling email chains from Farah’s brothers, as had the NSW Architects Registration Board.
A tired-looking Farah massaged his temples as he sat on one side of the court on Monday morning behind his formidable legal team. Sibtain and Marina Olsen have both acted for media companies, including the publishers of the Herald.
George was sitting as far away as he could get from Farah on Monday, behind his equally fearsome defence team – Kieran Smark, SC, and Victoria-Jane Otavski.
Family chaos
The massive defamation trial has triggered the final implosion of the Georges family after decades when the siblings forged and sundered alliances.
Farah told the court about allegations of infidelities in relationships, threats of petrol bombing children, accusations of incest rape and parents removing children from wills.
There was also the moment George’s wife rammed his car as it sat in his parents’ driveway.
The family converged on the chaos, Farah said, and Bassam urged police to charge Farah because he had guns in the home.
“I shot quails, and I ate them,” Farah told the court, explaining he had fired his uncle’s gun when he was a teenager.
“Koalas?” Sibtain asked.
“Quails,” Farah said.
Farah had fired a gun only one other time, he told the court, and he had no guns in the home.
The defence put forward by Bassam and George is that Farah is truly a sexual abuser and, using a defence known as contextual truth, that means their emails could not have harmed his reputation any further.
Sibtain called the claims “rubbish”. Opening his case two weeks earlier, Sibtain said George and Bassam were trying to “crush” Farah’s professional life by including those recipients.
Bassam and George’s lawyers countered by presenting Farah’s criminal history: he was convicted of fraudulently passing himself off as an architect in 1992.
Farah told the court he had passed out in his own garage following the fallout from the emails, clutching a bottle of Johnnie Walker scotch, a cigar and his favourite biscuits, scotch fingers.
“Nobody wanted to help, and I didn’t want to do the wrong thing,” he said.
“I did not rape my brother nor my sisters. I did not rape anybody. I did not molest anybody.
“I just want to be left alone. Who can stop George and Bassam?”
1800RESPECT (1800 737 732).