Joe Aston’s AFR columns ‘obliterated’ mental health, Elaine Stead tells court

Joe Aston’s columns about Elaine Stead ‘completely obliterated’ her mental health and forced her to take a month off, Federal Court hears.

Former BlueSky Capital executive Elaine Stead enters Supreme Court in Sydney for a hearing of her defamation case against the Financial Review. Picture: Britta Campion

Elaine Stead had “suicidal thoughts” and took a month off to get psychological help after her mental health was “obliterated” by a column by Financial Review journalist Joe Aston, the former Blue Sky director told the Federal Court.

On the second day of her defamation trial against Aston, Dr Stead told the court that she took time off to get “intensive therapy’’ in the wake of a column published in February 2019. She felt that a later column published in October entitled “Fox in Steven Marshall’s burning henhouse’’, was “calling for my sacking’’.

“I knew this would be a death-knell for my career,’’ Dr Stead told the court.

Dr Stead is suing Aston for defamation over a series of columns, published in The Australian Financial Review, which she claims made her look “reckless” and “stupid”.

The trial is scheduled to run for two weeks and will call numerous witnesses from Australia’s start-up and venture capital community.

Aston’s legal team has yet to argue in his defence, but court documents filed to date show that he, and his employer Nine Entertainment Co., will be arguing honest opinion as a defence.

Dr Stead told the court that as a venture capital investor, her reputation, which Aston attacked, was at the core of what she does.

She said that Aston’s characterisation of her as “stupid’’, and as having made “fatuous” investments in “peanut start-ups”, was something which “embarrassed and mortified’’ her.

She said she was particularly hurt by Aston’s claim that she was a “venture capital pyromaniac’’, in the “Fox in the henhouse” article’.

That article also suggested that South Australian Premier Steven Marshall should pay her “not to invest” on the government’s behalf, rather than to run the state’s venture capital fund, as she was doing, Dr Stead said.

“Firstly the reference to me being a venture capital pyromaniac was the thing that, again, was my first, immediate, visceral reaction was to that statement,’’ Dr Stead told the court.

“My understanding of pyromaniac [in this sense] was someone who deliberately sets fire to people’s money because they get some sort of pleasure or high from it.

“And I felt like that statement was again trying to undermine my reputation as a fund manager.’’

Dr Stead she felt “very angry and incredibly hurt’’ by the pyromaniac description.

“My reputation has taken me a long time to develop and to have it characterised in that way, for the entire world to see, and the entire world is important because I co-invest with investors from all over the globe, I just found that humiliating and I found it completely undermining.

“And once it’s out there on the internet it’s really hard to recover from that.’’

Dr Stead said the “continued … gendered references’’ in the article were “incredibly misogynistic’’ and “designed to degrade me’’.

“Mr Aston might have a view that I am not very intelligent or he might have a view that I am not very good at my job, but he certainly doesn’t need to point out my gender in order to make those comments, and the only reason I can think he is doing that is for misogynistic reasons,’’ she said.

“So that very made me very angry, but, you know, not surprising given Mr Aston’s history.’’

Dr Stead said Aston’s description of now-defunct Shoes of Prey as a bad investment ignored the large amount of due diligence done by Blue Sky, and the state of the business at the time.

She said the company had experienced an “honest failure”, as happened often in the venture capital world, where companies are trying to do “really hard things”.

The case continues.

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