Investigative journalist defends stories on renowned orthopaedic surgeon

An investigative journalist has batted away allegations that a series of articles she helped write, which criticised the medical practice of a renowned orthopaedic surgeon, implied he took “shortcuts to make money”.

On Tuesday, reporter for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald Charlotte Grieve defended the depth and fairness of her reporting as she was cross-examined by surgeon Munjed Al Muderis’ barrister, Sue Chrysanthou, SC, in the Federal Court.

Munjed Al Muderis is pursuing a defamation case over reports from 2022.Credit: Dion Georgopoulos

The months-long defamation trial will also see 60 Minutes reporter Tom Steinfort and producer Natalie Clancy take the stand in coming days.

Al Muderis is suing The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and 60 Minutes over reports published and aired in September 2022.

He alleges the reports convey a range of defamatory meanings, including that he negligently performed osseointegration surgery and provided inadequate aftercare. Osseointegration surgery involves fitting a prosthetic leg directly onto the bone of an amputated leg.

Nine Entertainment Co, owner of the media outlets being sued, is seeking to rely on a range of defences including a new public interest defence, truth and honest opinion.

Over hours of cross-examination of Grieve, Chrysanthou scrutinised, sentence by sentence, a series of published articles in The Age and Sydney Morning Herald on Al Muderis, taking aim at words and headlines used in the stories.

Investigative journalist Charlotte Grieve (left) arrives at the Federal Court of Australia.Credit: Dion Georgopoulos

Chrysanthou suggested Nine deliberately focused on “highly sensational or evocative claims” to incite disgust about her client from readers and viewers, including a patient’s account that he had developed maggots after surgery.

She also alleged the use of words such as “mutilated” and “botched” implied Al Muderis’ glowing reputation was “fake and undeserved” and suggested the majority of his patients were unhappy and had “suffered” at the hands of the orthopaedic surgeon.

Grieve told the court the published articles made it “abundantly clear” that not all patients were unhappy after their treatment. “In both the print and in broadcast [stories], we are at great pains to acknowledge that many people were happy, although for the ones [patients] who weren’t there were similar patterns and significant concerns,” she said.

On the matter of maggots, Grieve told the court: “It’s a distressing situation of an unforeseen risk of this surgery that was not tended to in an appropriate time or manner.”

Chrysanthou also accused Grieve and Nine Publishing of attempting to unfairly paint Al Muderis as a surgeon who “developed a reputation for rarely saying no” and who lived a life of luxury, including driving a McLaren and being spotted in his wife’s Lamborghini.

But Grieve told the court the financial aspect of the story was relevant because many patients had spent their life savings to pay for the surgeries performed by Al Muderis.

“It was relevant to the story insofar as patients had expressed to us concerns that he was presenting himself as purely altruistic, purely motivated by humanitarian work, and was often doing a lot of these surgeries for free,” Grieve told the court.

“We knew through … US court documents, at least, that he was making significant profit margins on osseointegration… it was a relevant point in the story because a number of patients had mentioned this seeming contrast between the public image that he portrays and the private reality that he lives.”

Before Grieve’s evidence, Al Muderis failed in an attempt to prevent a peer’s assessment of him to be allowed to be used as evidence in the case.

Federal Court judge Wendy Abraham ruled that the court would accept evidence from a Sydney surgeon that Al Muderis had a “poor reputation” among some of his colleagues and is “considered to lack judgment, empathy and, on several occasions, felt to have made poor decisions”.

Orthopaedic surgeon Dr Dimitri Papadimitriou gave evidence last year that he had performed surgery on one of Al Muderis’ former patients, Leah Mooney, in September 2011, after Al Muderis had twice operated to fix Mooney’s badly broken left leg.

Papadimitriou told a hearing last year he had observed that the “fracture had been fixed in a poor alignment” during the first surgery, with the leg “going outwards” and the court previously heard a piece of drill had been left in the patient’s leg.

Abraham wrote in her ruling Papadimitriou’s evidence was “admissible and there is no proper basis to exclude it” from the trial.

But Abraham’s finding was disputed in court by Chrysanthou, who told the court Al Muderis had only been a surgeon for two years in 2011, and argued Papadimitriou was “an outlier” in his opinion of the high-profile orthopaedic surgeon.

“The evidence we’re seeking to address is not to remedy his [Al Muderis’] reputation in 2011 ... it is his reputation in 2022 at the time of publication,” she said.

“That’s quite a different category to his reputation, over a decade later ... and it’s frankly, in our submission, pretty worthless.”

An ensuing legal debate at times became heated, with Abraham at one point telling Chrysanthou she did not need to yell . Chrysanthou responded: “I’m not yelling.”

The trial continues.

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