Kerry Stokes, Capilano win defamation case against blogger over toxic honey, sex claims

A blogger who claimed the media mogul and Capilano peddled ‘toxic honey’ has been forced to make a huge settlement.

Seven West media boss Kerry Stokes. Picture: Nikki Short

A maverick blogger who accused media mogul Kerry Stokes and the chief executive of a company he part-owns – Capilano Honey – of being “up to their necks in a judicial favours scam” has been forced to pay $175,000 in damages after the NSW Supreme Court found the food company and Dr Ben McKee were defamed in a series of online articles.

Shane Dowling, who was briefly jailed in 2018 for repeatedly breaching a suppression order related to the Tim Worner and Amber Harrison court case, claimed that Capilano was peddling “toxic and poisonous honey” and that the company’s directors had “covered up” a sex tape that featured chief executive Ben McKee.

In a judgment delivered on Friday, Justice Richard Button said the defamatory imputations jumped “off the page” in each of the eleven articles published between September 2016 and March 2017 on Dowling’s notorious website, Kangaroo Court of Australia.

Capilano Honey Chief Operating Officer Ben McKee. Picture: AAP

Dowling has also been permanently restrained from republishing the offending material after the court found his previous conduct indicated he would do “as he sees fit” and continue to defame Capilano and Dr McKee unless he was subjected to “serious sanction”.

Capilano and Dr Mckee launched court proceedings in early 2020, with Mr Dowling being sued for defamation by Dr McKee and injurious falsehood by the company.

In a statement of claim, the company’s lawyers alleged each of the eleven publications carried a number of defamatory imputations about Capilano, now known as Hive and Wellness Australia, and Dr McKee, including that they put the “lives of Australians at risk” by selling honey that is “full of antibiotics, toxins, irradiated pollen from China and alkaloids.”

They also claimed that Dowling was “motived by malice” and had set out to “harm the interests” of Mr Stokes through an attack on Capilano.

Those claims were “defamatory” and an “exercise in bootstrapping”, Justice Button said, and ordered Dowling to pay $25,000 in damages to the company and $150,000 to Dr McKee.

While Dr McKee had sought $407,500 in damages – the present cap for non-economic loss in defamation cases – Justice Button said “right-thinking people” would take Dowling’s claims with “a very large grain of salt”.

“The title of the KCA itself (a colloquialism well known to Australians), its logo (a cartoonish jumping kangaroo), and the other extreme or radical claims made upon that website by the defendant, would lead many of those who read the material complained of to do so with further circumspection,” Justice Button found.

But it was “undeniable,” he said, that Dowling portrayed Dr McKee as a dishonest, corrupt and manipulative person who oversaw a business that endangered the health of Australians.

He also found Dowling stated Dr McKee had sought to take advantage of a workplace power imbalance for sexual gratification by claiming there was a sex tape featuring him “talking about having anal sex with a female staff member at Capilano Honey.”

In delivering his verdict, Justice Button deferred to an array of metaphors to debunk Dowling’s claims that Capilano Honey contained “toxic” or “poisonous” ingredients.

He said that just because coffee contains caffeine, and drinking 100 cups of coffee in a day could be injurious to health, that did not mean a single cup could be described as “toxic.”

Dowling was also “well aware” he had breached “a super-injunction”, Justice Button said, but was content to do so because of a “pervading sense of righteousness.”

In 2017, Dowling was jailed for four months when Supreme Court Justice Ian Harrison had found he had “flagrantly” and “enthusiastically” breached non-publication orders when he named two women accused of having affairs with then Seven boss Tim Worner.

At one point during last year’s hearing, Justice Button threatened to eject Dowling from the courtroom after he tried to record the proceedings without the court’s permission.