Ray Martin defends 60 Minutes crew, recalls child recovery he filmed in the 1980s

VETERAN broadcaster Ray Martin has defended the ethics of the jailed 60 Minutes crew, revealing his own involvement in a child recovery.

VETERAN broadcaster Ray Martin has defended the ethics of the jailed 60 Minutes crew, admitting that he drove the getaway car after filming a child recovery in Spain in 1980s.

As one of the founding reporters of the award-winning current affairs program, Martin travelled to Spain with a Tasmanian woman whose 20-month-old son had been taken there by her estranged footballer husband.

Hiding inside a Barcelona cafe, Martin and his camera crew risked imprisonment to capture the rescue on film before fleeing the country.

The mother snatched up the boy while the father was in the bathroom and Martin said he then drove the car across Spain.

“I ended up driving the car from Barcelona in Spain where the child was taken by the private detective and the woman’s father...and then we drove across Spain,” Martin revealed on Brisbane radio on Thursday.

It was a mission undertaken with full knowledge of the potential consequences, he said.

Sally Faulkner has been detained in Lebanon, along with the 60 Minutes team, after attempting to retrieve her children Lahela and Noah.

Ms Faulkner’s children have been returned to the custody of their father Ali Elamine.

“I was aware of that and that’s one of the risks you’d take,” he said.

“Ethically, as a journalist, I thought we were doing the right thing, because the courts had judged the case and decided that the mother had custody of the children, and the father had broken Australian laws and taken the children away.”

The father, he said, had “whisked the child off out of Australia, against the law, and taken them to another country ... in this case Spain, where fathers have the right to children ... An old-fashioned law, if you like, in the sense that men have a goods and chattels in their wives and children.”

Quizzed about the merits of the story, Martin said he believed pursuing it was “the decent thing to do”, faced with a mother in acute distress over the prospect of never seeing her child again.

“I guess if you’re in the situation of the mother or the family and a child is taken, never to be seen again, that is a huge story that I would find a valid story for a journalist to do.”

He said that no payment was made by Channel 9 to the private investigator enlisted by the Tasmanian mother.

“We certainly didn’t pay any money to them,” Martin said.

Ray Martin is concerned for the fate of his friends and colleagues.

The fate of the 60 Minutes team, languishing in a Lebanese jail cell, weighed heavily on his mind.

Reporter Tara Brown, senior producer Stephen Rice, cameraman Ben Williamson and sound recordist David Ballment face kidnapping charges over the failed attempt to retrieve Brisbane mother Sally Faulkner’s two young children in Beirut.

The group has been charged with conspiracy to commit a crime, kidnapping and physical assault and are awaiting another court appearance before a judge on Monday. The offences carry jail terms of up to 20 years.

“I’m very conscious of what’s happening in Lebanon and they’re friends and colleagues of mine, so I would say nothing about that that might affect the case, but it’s obviously, it’s very serious,” Martin said.

Asked if it was “feasible” that Channel 9 could have paid the specialist child recovery agency engaged by Ms Faulkner, as alleged by the Lebanese authorities, he said: “I have no idea”.

“That’s one of the areas I wouldn’t comment on," he said, adding: “I know the crew are highly ethical, and I can’t believe they would do something that’s unethical.”

Things aren’t looking good for the jailed 60 Minutes team.

When asked why a child recovery story was worth risking jail for, Martin said it was about “attempting to right a wrong”.

“As journalists we do stories that we think are right, and are ethical,” he said.

“If you don't take risks in war zones and other areas then you don't do your job as a journalist ... No one’s being marched into these areas, but I suspect that the four people involved, who are highly professional and experienced, thought that it was a valid story and it was an ethical story.”

In a first person account of the Barcelona rescue mission published in Fairfax Media’s Good Weekend in 1984, Martin’s then-producer Gordon Bick expressed reservations while looking back on the event.

While then-executive producer Gerald Stone had “described it as my finest hour”, Bick wrote: “I wasn’t so sure.”

“It meant being on the inside of a kidnap plot and siding with the mother against the father, something that worried me,” he said.

“It certainly made a good story for 60 Minutes, with a lot of promotion value. But should we have taken sides in a family dispute over a baby?”

Bick recalled the frantic “dash across Spain” with “the police in hot pursuit”, concluding: “I can’t help feeling that I would still be sitting in a Spanish jail if I had been caught by the police ...”

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Originally published as Ray Martin defends 60 Minutes crew, recalls child recovery he filmed in the 1980s