Avenging angel or lethal opportunist: Celebrity lawyer Sue Chrysanthou

This story is part of the Good Weekend: Best of Features 2024 editon.See all 12 stories.

For Sue Chrysanthou, celebrity lawyer, it must have been a strange feeling. Normally, in the courtroom, she was the interrogator, grilling witnesses as she built the case for her clients. Now the tables were turned and she was the one in the witness box, preparing to testify. The evidence she would give would be the truth, she said. The whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Chrysanthou is a defamation barrister. Some would say she’s the defamation barrister. If you’re rich or famous and believe your good name has been besmirched, she is the person you’re likely to call. Media magnate Lachlan Murdoch, Oscar-winning actor Geoffrey Rush, politician Pauline Hanson, former radio broadcaster Alan Jones: all have enlisted her to go into battle for them. So, too, have mining mogul Gina Rinehart and Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich. Most recently, she has acted for ousted Victorian state Liberal MP Moira Deeming, who alleges Victorian Liberal leader John Pesutto defamed her by falsely linking her with neo-Nazis.

But on that day in May 2021, as Chrysanthou took the stand in the Federal Court, the reputation on the line was her own. She had been accused by a former client of doing the wrong thing by her, a serious criticism for any member of her profession. For Chrysanthou, a star practitioner recently appointed a senior counsel or “silk”, the stakes were especially high.

Three months beforehand, the ABC had published an online news story by Four Corners reporter Louise Milligan. The story said a woman had taken her own life after claiming that a serving cabinet minister –unnamed in the article – had raped her decades earlier when both were teenagers. Christian Porter, who was the federal attorney-general, identified himself as the parliamentarian in question but vehemently protested his innocence (charges were never laid). Intent on suing Milligan and the ABC for defamation, Porter engaged Chrysanthou to be his advocate in what promised to be a sensational trial.

There was a hitch. A recent client of Chrysanthou, Adelaide Writers’ Week director Jo Dyer, was a longtime friend of the woman who had died. Dyer believed confidential information she had given Chrysanthou could be used to Porter’s advantage in the defamation case. What was more, Dyer had been a source for Milligan’s story and considered herself likely to be called as a witness for the ABC. She argued that this disqualified Chrysanthou from representing Porter. When Chrysanthou refused to step aside, Dyer applied for an injunction to force her to do so.

By the time I browse through a transcript of the resulting court proceedings, I have been working for a while on a profile piece on Chrysanthou and am aware that she is a polarising figure. Many see her as a force for good – an avenging angel in barrister’s robes who wins hefty compensation payouts for the unjustly maligned. To others, particularly people in the media, she is a hard-nosed opportunist who profits handsomely from picking holes in public interest journalism.

Under cross-examination, Chrysanthou was asked about conversations she’d had with barrister Matthew Richardson, one of her close friends. Richardson was strongly against her acting for Porter. In his view, she had a conflict of interest. Why did she disregard his opinion? “Because I had spoken to two former Bar Association presidents,” she told the court. “I had spoken to other silks and everyone disagreed with Matthew.”

I pause at that part of the transcript, and reflect that journalism and the law have something in common. Both involve sifting through opinions and perceptions in an attempt to find the truth that lies beneath.

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Sue Chrysanthou is a big personality. That much is obvious just from the news pictures of her striding in and out of court. Smiling brightly, unruly curls flying, she’s at least as commanding a presence as whichever high-profile client she is accompanying. “Sue has main-character energy,” says radio presenter Ben Fordham, using a social-media term for individuals with unusual levels of oomph and self-assurance. “Essentially, it’s someone who thinks they’re the main character in the story,” explains the breakfast program host on Sydney’s 2GB (owned by Nine, which publishes Good Weekend). “And I don’t mean that disrespectfully. When Sue walks into a room, everyone knows that she’s there. When she talks, people listen.”

“She thinks she’s Jerry Seinfeld. When she rings me, she’ll go, ‘Hey, do you want to hear the funniest thing?’ ”

Ben Fordham

Barristers can find themselves playing to sizeable audiences these days: the Federal Court, where most defamation cases are fought, has a YouTube channel that live-streams selected hearings. “Sue has gained a bit of a fan club because she’s good at nailing her brief and keeping everyone’s attention,” says Fordham. Nicholas Olson, a junior counsel who often assists Chrysanthou, attests to her ability to enliven proceedings: “Her manner of presenting cases isn’t stuffy or formal. She’ll make funny comments and tell jokes during a hearing.”

One day earlier this year, things turned slapstick. “I’m responsible for breaking Sue’s tailbone,” Olson admits. “This happened during the Al Muderis trial, which I guess was a good time to do it since we had an orthopaedic surgeon for a client.” (Munjed Al Muderis, a specialist in the surgical technique osseointegration, was suing Nine over a 60 Minutes story and a series of articles in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. The case is ongoing.) Olson explains that he and Chrysanthou were sitting together at the bar table. When she stood up to speak, he slid her chair back. Unaware that it had been moved, she went to sit down again and fell to the floor. On YouTube, it was as if she’d dropped through a trapdoor. Her later discovery that she had sustained a fracture allowed her to tell people she’d literally busted her arse for her client.

“She thinks she’s Jerry Seinfeld,” says Fordham. “When she rings me, she’ll go, ‘Hey, do you want to hear the funniest thing?’ That’s how most conversations start.” Fordham and Chrysanthou became friends through their mutual support of former commando Heston Russell, who sued the ABC over reports suggesting he was involved in killing an Afghan prisoner. Though Fordham knows how driven Chrysanthou is, and how ruthless a litigator she can be (“lethal” is the word he uses), he has learnt that for her, almost every case provides moments of mirth. Even when the subject matter is grim and her demeanour in the courtroom unusually solemn, he knows she’ll find something to laugh about afterwards. “The moment the door’s shut, she’s like, ‘Holy shit, how funny was that bit?’ ”

With former commando Heston Russell after his $390,000 win against the ABC.Credit: Ben Fordham

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London used to be the defamation capital of the world. Now the title belongs to Sydney, and 44-year-old Chrysanthou is the busiest defamation barrister in the city. In a sworn statement she prepared for the case brought against her by Jo Dyer, she said it wasn’t unusual for her to be briefed on two or three new matters a week. Not all of them were in her litigious home town. In the previous year, she had also been briefed on matters in Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane and Perth. She had appeared in seven trials, a similar number of appeal hearings and a dozen or so mediations.

Hectic. And her responsibilities didn’t end there. Chrysanthou made clear in the affidavit that her life outside the law was full, too. She worked from home as much as possible because she had four young children and sidelined as a registered wildlife carer. The various creatures she rescued and raised needed feeding several times a day.

Chrysanthou declined to be interviewed for this story but her friends confirm that her house in the inner-Sydney suburb of Glebe is a whirl of human and animal activity. Besides her partner, senior counsel Kieran Smark, and their kids aged six to 13, she shares the premises with two 17-year-old poodle crosses; a 10-year-old blue-tongued lizard; two cockatiels that fly through the rooms, and an ever-changing population of injured and orphaned possums. At one stage, she fostered a young kangaroo that was occasionally glimpsed by clients as it bounded past during video-calls.

In the backyard, the family has two beehives. Chrysanthou bottles the honey and sells it at a local cafe under the label Glebe Gold. “I say to her, ‘Sometimes I feel that being a barrister is the least interesting part of you’,” lawyer Gina Edwards tells me. “She’s also, by the way, an incredible dancer. She takes hip-hop classes.”

Walking is Chrysanthou’s main form of exercise. Because her time is valuable ($800 an hour, plus GST), she makes and takes business calls while marching towards her target of 30,000 steps a day. Colleagues and clients are accustomed to discussing cases with her while she prowls the streets of her neighbourhood collecting foliage for the possums to eat, or makes the trek to and from her chambers in the city. If she isn’t outdoors, she’s pacing on gym equipment. Before embarking on a recent trip to Europe, she fretted at the prospect of prolonged immobilisation in a plane seat. “Why don’t they have treadmills?” she was heard to ask.

Heston Russell prides himself on his stamina, but says he struggled to keep up with Chrysanthou when she represented him in his defamation suit against the ABC. The two regularly burned the midnight oil while she combed through documents, looking for flaws in the broadcaster’s defence. (“I work late into the night after my children go to bed, often until 2am,” she said in the Dyer case affidavit.) If Russell wasn’t with her in person, she had him on the phone line. “There was one time I was on the phone to her that I actually fell asleep,” he says.

Russell isn’t the only one. “She’ll talk things through as she prepares her submissions or cross-examination,” says solicitor Rebekah Giles, who works so closely with Chrysanthou that they’re regarded as a double act: the dynamic duo of defamation litigation. Both seem drawn to cases that make news and both are comfortable in the spotlight, but Giles’ role is mainly behind the scenes. Before Chrysanthou’s court appearances, they have marathon evening phone conferences. If Giles feels herself fading, she takes the phone to bed. Sometimes she flakes out. “It will be three in the morning, and my partner will wake up and hear Sue’s voice saying, ‘Hello? Rebekah? Are you awake?’ ”

Chrysanthou (second from right) with boxer-client Harry Garside, solicitor Rebekah Giles and Heston Russell.

If you were tracing the path that led to Chrysanthou’s own stint in the witness box, you could start at a meeting held in her chambers in November 2020. One of those present was Jo Dyer. Another was James Hooke, then a senior Macquarie Group executive who, like Dyer, was a friend of Christian Porter’s late accuser, the woman who would come to be known in the media as “Kate”. Dyer’s solicitor, Michael Bradley, was there, too, as was Chrysanthou’s friend, Matthew Richardson. Before the meeting, Richardson had provided Chrysanthou with a copy of a lengthy written statement in which Kate detailed her allegations against Porter.

Nothing of this had yet been made public, but excerpts of an interview that Dyer gave the ABC’s Louise Milligan, including some oblique remarks about Porter, had been used in a Four Corners program called Inside the Canberra Bubble. Dyer was considering taking legal action against The Australian over an article she believed misrepresented her reasons for appearing on the program. Chrysanthou agreed to help draft a concerns notice. Though it was the first time she and Dyer had met, she said she would do this as a favour rather than for a fee.

“I genuinely liked her,” says Dyer, who presumed everything said at the meeting was confidential, like all communications between lawyers and their clients. She says both she and Hooke spoke unguardedly to Chrysanthou about Kate and gave a rundown of the ABC’s investigation of her allegations – “who they had spoken to, what they were pursuing, what they knew. It was just a really comprehensive dump of information”. In the weeks after the meeting, the participants followed up with a phone conference and sporadic exchanges of emails. In January 2021, Chrysanthou spoke on Dyer’s behalf to a lawyer acting for The Australian.

In February, the ABC published Louise Milligan’s story containing Kate’s rapist-in-cabinet claim. This was followed in early March by a Four Corners program featuring longer excerpts of Dyer’s interview. When Porter moved to sue the ABC for defamation, Dyer and Hooke were aghast to learn that Chrysanthou had signed on to represent him. “We did everything we could to persuade her to step off the case and she just would not do it,” says Dyer, who knew the cost of taking Chrysanthou and Porter to court could be ruinous. “My lawyers agreed to work on a ‘no-win, no-fee’ basis but if we’d lost, we’d have been up for paying their lawyers. There was a lot of anxiety.” In the end, Dyer felt she had no choice. As she saw it, Chrysanthou had betrayed her – and, in the process, betrayed Kate. “The idea that she would get away with it was too much to bear.”

“She’s always trying to get the advantage. People who aren’t prepared to play … get a bit bulldozed by her.”

Anyone who has strayed into Chrysanthou’s orbit will tell you how engaging she can be. “Utterly disarming,” says senior counsel Mark Seymour, for whom her “natural talent at getting people to like her” is one of her defining characteristics. Chrysanthou’s unaffectedness was what struck a fellow guest at a Christmas party hosted by Lachlan Murdoch. “She’s not afraid to be herself,” the observer says. “In a world where so many people are monitoring their language and second-guessing themselves, Sue just kind of walks in and throws a few grenades around and cracks a few jokes. People gravitate towards that.” Says Ben Fordham: “It doesn’t matter where she is, more eyes and more ears are directed towards Sue than anyone else in the room.”

Not that all the glances are admiring. Some of her fellow lawyers have reservations about Chrysanthou, regarding her as too pushy. Too brash. Too willing to work the angles. “I think she’s always been seen as a bit of an upstart,” says Rebekah Giles. But there’s more to it than that. A senior Sydney defamation specialist who acknowledges that Chrysanthou is a highly effective operator says her determination to win cases can lead to unfortunate habits, such as putting opposing barristers off their stride by muttering or laughing at the bar table while they have the floor. “She’s regarded as indiscreet,” the defamation lawyer adds. “A bit sneaky. And very strategic. She’ll do whatever she can to sort of muscle in and poison the judge’s mind against whoever is opposing her by putting a particular spin on whatever has happened or whatever is at issue. She’s always trying to get the advantage. People who aren’t prepared to play the game that way get a bit bulldozed by her.”

Chrysanthou with Rebekah Giles, are considered a “double-act”.Credit: Louie Douvis

Barristers are guns for hire. They sweep into court, make their arguments, and sweep out. Mostly, it’s left to the solicitors who manage the cases to bond with the clients. Chrysanthou’s style is different. Far from keeping a professional distance, she invites her clients into her life – cooks dinner for them, introduces them to her kids. She will put an arm around the person she’s representing as they walk out of court. “There are people in the profession who think, ‘Tut, tut, tut’,” says Mark Seymour. “I look at it and think, ‘Yes, but her client loved it’.”

The law is so complex and its rituals so arcane that court cases can both bewilder and terrify the layperson. “When you’re embarking on litigation, you want someone to speak very plainly to you,” says Elaine Stead, a former director of Blue Sky Alternative Investments, who successfully sued The Australian Financial Review and journalist Joe Aston over columns published in 2019. Chrysanthou not only demystified the process but offered emotional support, Stead says. “That gritty, straight-talking, straight-shooter side of her is balanced by someone who will give you a hug when you need it. She made a cake for me at the end of our court case. She was constantly checking in on me, in an almost maternal way.”

Defamation plaintiffs can be in a fragile state, says barrister Gina Edwards, who was a client of Chrysanthou before they became friends. Edwards sued Nine’s A Current Affair over two broadcasts and accompanying articles about a custody dispute between her and the co-owner of her cavoodle, Oscar. She alleged the programs portrayed her as a dog thief, prompting thousands of people to attack her online. Edwards tells me she considered suicide. “I went so far as to put rocks in my North Face jacket and start to go down to Sydney Harbour. It was the darkest time of my life.” She credits Chrysanthou with rescuing her – first by taking her case, then by taking her under her wing. In April, she was awarded $150,000 in damages.

Chrysanthou had one of the best costumes at Edwards’ Halloween party last year: she went as a member of the rock band KISS, complete with black-and-white face paint. Edwards wishes Chrysanthou would put even a fraction as much effort into her appearance on a day-to-day basis, but grooming is low on her list of priorities: “She is someone who says, ‘Why do you care what I look like?’ ” If anything, Chrysanthou promotes the idea that she’s permanently dishevelled, spreading the story that she goes to court with sticks in her hair from her foliage-gathering expeditions. “She hates wearing make-up, hates getting her hair done, hates dressing up,” says Heston Russell. Ben Fordham remembers seeing Chrysanthou at a fundraiser for which well-meaning acquaintances had forced her to glam up. “She was like, ‘I’m not wearing bloody eyelashes!’ And they were like, ‘You are!’ ” Fordham felt a bit sorry for her. “Sue looked about as comfortable in fake lashes as I would.”

Chrysanthou dressed up as a member of the rock band, KISS, at a Halloween party, holding her dogs.

When Chrysanthou was deciding whether to represent Christian Porter, one of the first people she consulted was leading defamation barrister Bruce McClintock. A long-time friend and mentor who had worked with her on major cases and supported her application for silk in 2020, senior counsel McClintock took her call in Tasmania, where he had just walked the South Coast Track. In a letter to the NSW Bar Council about his recollection of their conversation, he said Chrysanthou had raised the “cab rank rule”, which obliges barristers to act for anyone who wants to use their services unless they are already busy. McClintock said he told her the rule did not apply in this instance: having acted for Jo Dyer, she could not now switch sides and act for Porter. “Whether or not there is a technical conflict, you can’t do it,” he recalled saying. “It’s just wrong.”

McClintock told the council that Chrysanthou seemed to him to be “desperate to accept the brief … I became extremely concerned for her because I thought that the consequences to her for agreeing to act for Porter would be personally and professionally disastrous.” He said she told him at the end of their phone call that she would refuse the Porter brief, which relieved him greatly. When he later discovered that she had, in fact, accepted it, he was dismayed.

“She sacrificed friendships and ignored the warnings of people who genuinely cared about her.”

Bruce McClintock

In the letter, McClintock added that a week or two later, he and another senior counsel were leaving the Society Caffe Bar in Phillip Street, in the heart of Sydney’s legal district, when Chrysanthou approached him. He said they had a short, heated exchange, which ended with McClintock saying: “I just think you are behaving unethically.”

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Theognosia Chrysanthou, as she was christened, was born three years after her Greek-Cypriot parents migrated to Australia in 1976. The younger of their two daughters, she seems always to have been a strong and independently minded person. “If there were any bullies in the playground, she’d go and sort them out,” says childhood friend Adam Brindley. In Canberra, where Chrysanthou’s family settled, she attended Telopea Park School, a French-Australian institution offering bilingual classes. Fellow pupil Tania Mayrhofer, who is still close to her, remembers her leading a student protest over French nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific: “We didn’t stand up for the French national anthem, and the teachers were really furious.”

As a teenager, Chrysanthou was obsessed with The Beatles and Michael Jackson. She wore Doc Martens shoes everywhere, even to the year 12 formal. She made amateur movies starring her friends. Academically, she excelled. “Sue was always going to be somebody,” Mayrhofer says. “Did I think she was going to be a senior counsel? No. I thought she would be a really famous film director.”

That was Chrysanthou’s ambition, but to keep her parents happy she enrolled in a course at the University of Technology Sydney that combined film classes with legal studies. She found law fascinating and changed career plans. Mark Seymour, who has been a friend since both were tipstaffs – junior assistants – to Supreme Court judges, says they were aware of the clubbiness of the world they were entering: “We weren’t private-school educated, hadn’t gone to the top-tier universities, so we saw ourselves as kindred souls.” Not that feeling like an outsider put a dint in Chrysanthou’s chutzpah. “She’s always been extremely confident,” says barrister Barry Dean, who met her around the same time.

Last October, the ABC was ordered to pay Heston Russell $390,000 in damages, a win Russell ascribes partly to Chrysanthou’s attention to detail. “Sue went through every document,” he tells me. “Every piece of evidence. She really cared.” Another factor? Her vice-like memory. Trawling through hundreds of pages of material during the late-night sessions with Russell, she would seize on a snippet of information and tell him it contradicted something she had read on a particular page of a particular document a week or more earlier. “Her recall is incredible,” he says.

Barry Dean reckons Chrysanthou can hold in her head all the evidence that’s been given in a court case. “Sometimes judges will try to correct her,” Dean says, “but the transcript always vindicates her. She always gets it right.” According to Tania Mayrhofer, this is not a new skill: “Her mind has always been like that. She can remember all the words to all The Beatles’ songs, all the Michael Jackson songs. Everything we did as kids. She remembers it all.”

But nobody’s perfect. In the dispute with Jo Dyer, Chrysanthou’s justification for accepting Porter’s brief was that the cab-rank rule required her to, and that she didn’t remember being given confidential information at the meeting in her chambers attended by Dyer and Hooke. She maintained that in any case, there was no conflict of interest. (In the subsequent court proceedings, she formally adopted a neutral role, just giving evidence rather than defending her position.)

Dyer won the case. Federal Court judge Tom Thawley ruled that Chrysanthou was indeed given confidential information, some of it potentially relevant to Porter’s defamation proceedings against the ABC. Even if that information had slipped her mind (and no one contended her evidence was anything other than honest), “her recollections are liable to being revived”, Thawley said. He referred to the importance of preserving confidence in the integrity of the judicial process, and said “a fair-minded member of the public would say that Ms Chrysanthou should not act for Mr Porter”. Dyer was awarded more than $430,000 in legal costs.

Porter dropped his defamation case but launched an appeal against Thawley’s ruling. Three judges dismissed that appeal in 2022. One of them, Justice Michael Lee, emphasised that Chrysanthou hadn’t been accused of doing anything unethical. Agreeing to represent Porter was a mistake, Lee said, but there was no suggestion she had acted in bad faith.

Barristers in criminal cases don’t get blamed for representing murderers – someone has to do it – but defamation lawyers can suffer by association with their clients. After Lachlan Murdoch hired Chrysanthou to pursue the small online news outlet, Crikey, (a Goliath-sues-David scenario if ever there was one), a person approached her in the street and said: “We thought you couldn’t go lower than Porter.”

Gina Edwards makes the point that a lawyer doesn’t have to share her clients’ values: “She can still empathise with their situation and do her best for them.” Edwards cites Chrysanthou’s representation of One Nation leader Pauline Hanson. She has twice acted for the right-wing populist parliamentarian, most recently defending her against a claim that she had breached section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act by telling Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi to “piss off back to Pakistan”. Chrysanthou is close enough to Hanson to have her carrot cake recipe, Edwards says. “But Pauline Hanson’s politics could not be more opposite to Sue’s. I mean, Sue is as far to the left as they come.”

With Gina Edwards (left) at Edwards’ defamation case.Credit: Nikki Short

Chrysanthou and her partner, Smark, acted for Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young when she successfully sued former Liberal Democratic Party senator David Leyonhjelm for defamation. Leyonhjelm was found to have falsely portrayed Hanson-Young as a hypocrite and misandrist during media interviews after a Senate confrontation in which he said she should “stop shagging men”. “It was a horrible thing to go through,” says Hanson-Young of her three days in the witness box. “I really felt like I had a bit of PTSD afterwards. But I look back and think, ‘Wow, I’m so lucky to have had Sue there.’ ”

Chrysanthou is a feminist, Hanson-Young assures me. Yet in the 2018 case that first made her name widely known, Chrysanthou’s relentless cross-examination of actor Eryn Jean Norvill helped Geoffrey Rush win a record $2.9 million in damages from The Daily Telegraph. Norvill had alleged that Rush sexually harassed her. Chrysanthou, then a junior counsel assisting Bruce McClintock, accused her of telling “a lot of lies”. “Rush Barrister Savages Actress,” part-read one headline. Outside the court, Norvill stood by her evidence. “I told the truth,” she said. “I know what happened. I was there.”

Aggression is one of Chrysanthou’s trademarks as a litigator, says Richard Ackland, publisher of the law journal, Justinian: “Some people say that what she lacks in finesse, she makes up for in ferocity.” When Blue Sky Alternative Investments’ Elaine Stead sued Joe Aston and The Australian Financial Review, the journalist expected his encounter with Chrysanthou to be bruising. Aston’s barrister, the late senior counsel Sandy Dawson, prepared him by putting him through simulated cross-examinations, with Dawson taking the role of Chrysanthou. “Sandy reduced me to a puddle,” says Aston. “So when I went into court to face her, I was quite nervous.” Anxiety soon gave way to a sense of relief. Being questioned by the real Chrysanthou was no picnic, obviously, and on any objective measure she came out on top – Stead won the case – but Aston says she didn’t run rings around him like Dawson had. “Everyone talks about her as some sort of magician in the courtroom. That wasn’t my experience.”

Some judges are charmed by Chrysanthou. Others, not so much. At one point in a 2019 defamation case brought against The Age by professional punter Eddie Hayson, whose advocates were McClintock and junior counsel Chrysanthou, Justice Robert Bromwich made clear to McClintock that he hadn’t missed Chrysanthou’s commentary on something that he, Bromwich, had just said: “I’m hearing a stage whisper of ‘that’s ridiculous’ from your junior.” During this year’s Munjed Al Muderis trial, Federal Court judge Wendy Abraham told Chrysanthou there was no need to yell. “I’m not yelling,” Chrysanthou shot back.

Acting for plaintiffs is Chrysanthou’s specialty, but she represented a defendant, television presenter Lisa Wilkinson, in one of the most avidly followed defamation cases of recent times. Former parliamentary staffer Bruce Lehrmann sued Wilkinson and her employer, the Ten Network, over an interview in which one of Lehrmann’s former colleagues, Brittany Higgins, claimed she had been raped at Parliament House in Canberra. Lehrmann wasn’t named in the interview, but maintained he was identifiable as the alleged culprit. During the trial, while making some point to the presiding judge, Michael Lee, Chrysanthou said: “Before your honour objects …” Lee saw an opportunity to remind her who was boss. “I don’t object, Ms Chrysanthou,” he said. “I rule.”

Suing for defamation can go horribly wrong. Just ask Ben Roberts-Smith, whose suit against The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Canberra Times and three journalists was dismissed last year after Justice Anthony Besanko ruled they had succeeded in proving to the civil standard that the Victoria Cross-winner was a war criminal and murderer. Similarly, Justice Lee found in the Lehrmann case that the defendants had proved the material they broadcast was substantially true: on the balance of probabilities, Lehrmann did rape Higgins. (Roberts-Smith and Lehrmann have both appealed.)

As Richard Ackland points out, these were rare victories for the media. Journalists and their publishers have lost three-quarters of the defamation cases they have defended in the Federal Court since 2015, he says. MinterEllison partner Peter Bartlett, who spent five years working on Nine’s defence in the Roberts-Smith case – and burst into tears of relief when the verdict came through – says the parties’ combined costs were about $30 million. Like Ackland, he believes defamation law in this country is weighted too heavily in favour of plaintiffs. “There needs to be a better balance between the right to protect one’s reputation and the public’s right to know,” Bartlett says.

Walkley Award-winning ABC journalist Steve Cannane agrees. He was sued over a chapter of his book, Fair Game: The Incredible Untold Story of Scientology in Australia, by two doctors he briefly mentioned in reference to a 1990 royal commission that condemned their use of experimental “deep sleep therapy” at Sydney’s Chelmsford psychiatric hospital. The doctors’ defamation suit was dismissed, but an appeal led by Chrysanthou was partially successful and a retrial was ordered. The book’s publisher, HarperCollins, settled the case last year and issued an apology. For Cannane, who did not apologise, it was a dispiriting reminder of how inadequately the law protects public interest journalism, and how lucrative the defamation industry is compared with publishing. He says he was paid a $30,000 advance for the book, which took him four years to write: “Sue Chrysanthou would have made more than that in the three days she cross-examined me.” (Like Joe Aston, Cannane found the cross-examination less challenging than expected. “Being questioned by Chrysanthou was like facing a fast bowler who sends down short stuff, ball after ball,” he says. “You’d rather that any day than being tied in knots by a wily old spinner.”)

In the Lehrmann case, Chrysanthou charged Wilkinson $800 an hour for “preparation, conferences, other attendances, advices, and travelling” and $8000 per day in court. (Ten’s barrister, Matt Collins, KC, charged the network $11,000 a day.) Like a lot of lawyers, Chrysanthou sometimes takes on what are known as speculative cases, entering a “no-win, no-fee” agreement with clients who cannot pay upfront. “In recent years, because I am so busy, I will only accept a speculative case once or twice a year,” she wrote in the affidavit for the Dyer case. At a forum in Melbourne in 2022, she seemed to contradict that, slipping into the third-person as she indignantly denied her services were out of reach of most people: “You’re saying, ‘No one can afford Sue.’ Well, Sue does half her year for free!”

Undoubtedly, Chrysanthou works for little or no charge on some deserving cases, including for Indigenous Australians through the National Justice Project. She also gives her time to mentoring young barristers. As Gina Edwards says, she isn’t a conspicuous spender: “She’s not driving a fancy car or wearing flashy jewellery. She’s not like that at all.”

Of course, few journalists drive Maseratis either. Peter Bartlett points to recent mass redundancies at media companies. “There is a whole list of reasons for that, but one of them is the huge cost of litigation,” he says. And Chrysanthou is a key player in the litigation boom. “She’s costing the media a fortune.”

When Sydney journalist Jenna Price contacted WIRES, the wildlife rescue service, to ask for help dealing with a mother and baby possum, Chrysanthou was the volunteer who turned up at her door. Price says she was impressed by the barrister’s kindness and competence. “But when I was telling other journalists this story, they’re going, ‘Oh my God, I couldn’t have that woman in my house.’ ”

After Jo Dyer won her legal action, forcing Chrysanthou off the Christian Porter case, Dyer and James Hooke complained to the NSW Bar Council about her behaviour in the imbroglio. Last year, after investigating the complaints, the council reprimanded Chrysanthou for unsatisfactory professional conduct, finding that she shouldn’t have accepted Porter’s brief in the first place, and that when she learnt of Dyer’s objections, should have returned it.
According to the council’s accompanying report, which wasn’t made public, Matthew Richardson and Bruce McClintock were not the only friends and colleagues to advise her against acting for Porter. A third barrister did, too, and a fourth urged caution, saying she would need to consider a number of factors before making a decision. The report says Chrysanthou then sought advice from eminent silk Bret Walker who, on the basis of the limited information she gave him, saw no reason to refuse the brief.

In legal circles, there’s a lingering sense of bafflement. Why did Chrysanthou seem so determined to act for Porter? Was she convinced that he had a right to her help? Or was the lure of a main-character role in a headline-making court case too strong to resist? After all, this was the nation’s first law officer, the federal attorney-general. Clients don’t come much bigger than that.

To Bruce McClintock, it was painfully obvious the exercise was going to end badly. “She sacrificed friendships and ignored the warnings of people who genuinely cared about her,” he says. “You can probably tell from my tone of voice that the whole thing makes me extremely sad.”

Those close to Chrysanthou say she believes she did the honourable thing in following the cab rank rule. The council’s reprimand deeply upset her. “Massively,” Heston Russell says. Another friend, lawyer Bridgette Styles, insists Chrysanthou’s behaviour was exemplary and the reprimand unfair. “Not that it has done Sue’s practice any harm,” says Styles. “She’s never been more in demand.”

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