Virna Kurniawan loses bid to sue Marrakai apartment body corporate chair in bizarre seven-year battle over her 2kg dog
A battle over a 2kg dog has cost his owner and a Darwin apartment complex thousands in legal fees, with the case including secret recordings, police call outs, and multiple legal battles costing thousands in fees.
A Darwin dog owner has lost her bid to sue the body corporate chair of her apartment block, in the latest in a bizarre, seven-year-long legal feud over a 2kg pup called Marcus.
The battle between Virna Kurniawan and the Marrakai apartment body corporate committee has culminated in secret recordings, assaults, police call outs, and incurred thousands in legal fees, with 11 personal violence orders, two local court criminal cases, three NTCAT contests and most recently a Supreme Court appeal of a failed defamation claim.
In September, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Brownhill rejected an appeal in which Ms Kurniawan‘s claimed she was defamed by the Body Corporate management committee chair Warren Gifkins in a 2019 report to all Marrakai apartment owners.
The dog owner claimed the report, which attempted to summarise the dispute, was motivated by malice, was defamatory, and accused Mr Gifkins of using racist and sexist language.
The court heard the trouble began when Ms Kurniawan and Marcus moved into her boyfriend’s home at the Darwin Marrakai apartments in late 2018 — despite a strict ‘no pets’ rule.
In his report, Mr Gifkins said the “hostilities” started as soon as the couple were warned about the apartment complex’s by-laws.
The management committee issued a notice of breach of the by-laws, and within 30 days of Ms Kurniawan and her pup moving in the ‘no dogs’ policy was taken to the Northern Territory Civil and Administrative Tribunal.
Mr Gifkins alleged in his report that after the Tribunal case was lodged, the couple “became aggressive and behaved in an intimidating and harassing manner against Committee Members”.
Justice Brownhill heard this included a confrontation where Ms Kurniawan told a woman with terminal brain cancer “I hope you die soon” and called her a “f**king bitch”.
Another incident occurred in the foyer when the building manager, Jason Gay, pushed Ms Kurniawan after she ‘provoked him’ by putting her phone near his face and filmed him.
Mr Gray was charged with assault, and later pleaded guilty with no conviction recorded and no penalty, aside from a victim’s impact levy.
In Mr Gifkin’s report, he said the judge ruled it was a low-level assault and he had disregarded Ms Kurniawan’s victim impact statement which was described as “at times ... looks as if it’s relating more to a war crime than the material on the agreed facts before the court”.
The Supreme Court also heard that two days after the assault, Ms Kurniawan and her boyfriend went into Mr Gifkins’s locked storage cage, emptied it and relocked it with their own padlock.
On 29 April 2019, the NTCAT ordered Ms Kurniawan and Mr Yerriah to remove the dog from the apartment building within 25 days, which they failed to do.
That same day Mr Gifkins called police after an alleged “verbal altercation” with Ms Kurniawan, and she was charged with contravening her personal violence order, but she was later found not guilty of any breach.
In June — 15 days after the doggy deadline — Ms Kurniawan, Mr Yerriah and Marcus moved out of the building.
Ms Kurniawan called for a review of the Tribunal decision, while her boyfriend lodged an unrelated NTCAT claim and said they would report the body corporate’s barrister to the Law Society.
In his 2019 report Mr Grifkins estimated the “affected residents” had spent more than $20,000 on their personal legal fees, with the committee voting to spend a further $18,000 to “protect the body corporate and its committee”.
“These legal matters appear to be driven by a desire by the unit owner to intimidate, harass, annoy and frustrate the Committee’s substantive work,” he wrote in his report.
Ms Kurniawan then unsuccessfully tried to sue Mr Grifkins over this report, alleging it defamed her, was motivated by malice and had an “overall inflammatory tenor”.
The Asian woman said the opening of the report — “Time to Open the Kimono” — was “racist, sexist and strongly indicative of malice”.
However in the Local Court, Mr Grifkins said this was a business idiom and a commercial term used to “refer to being open and transparent”.
After the Local Court dismissed her defamation claim in 2024, Ms Kurniawan lodged an appeal in the Supreme Court.
She claimed it was an error of law of the judge to find the body corporate claims were “substantially true”, that “qualified privilege applied” or that Mr Grikins was “not motivated by malice in publishing the report”.
But in her 77-page judgement, Justice Sonia Brownhill went through all 21 points of appeal raised by Ms Kurniawan, and found there was nothing “vituperative or inflammatory” about the report.
“They are words entirely accurate and appropriate to the context,” Justice Brownhill said.
She said while there could be “some feelings of ill-will, dislike or indignation” between the body corporate chair and the dog-owner, it was “clearly not sufficient to infer that he was motivated by an improper purpose to publish the report”.
Indeed she said the core argument of the appeal were not errors of law, but rather an attempt to overrule the judges findings that Ms Kurniawan’s evidence was “unreliable”.
“The real gravamen of the complaints is that... the Local Court wrongly decided that Ms Kurniawan lacked credibility and wrongly decided the factual questions which determined the outcome of the case,” Justice Brownhill said.
“To find that Ms Kurniawan was an unreliable witness was not a denial of procedural fairness”.
More Coverage
Originally published as Virna Kurniawan loses bid to sue Marrakai apartment body corporate chair in bizarre seven-year battle over her 2kg dog
