Quadens family are suing miranda devine for her fucked up comments.
And have succeeded.
Twitter will continue to bring people unstuck. It's too easy just to shoot your mouth off without some sort of vetting, or, in the case of a newspaper, an editor being able to pull you up before something goes into print.
Quaden Bayles and family to receive close to $200,000 in damages in settlement over Miranda Devine tweets
News Corp columnist apologised for ‘hurtful and untrue’ comments about Indigenous boy with dwarfism
Amanda Meade
Wed 23 Sep 2020 08.31 AESTLast modified on Wed 23 Sep 2020 09.07 AEST
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Quaden Bayles and his mother will receive close to $200,000 in damages plus legal costs after an agreement was reached with the News Corp columnist Miranda Devine. Photograph: Dave Hunt/AAP
The family of Quaden Bayles, a nine-year-old Indigenous boy with dwarfism, will receive close to $200,000 in damages plus legal costs after an agreement was reached with the
News Corp columnist Miranda Devine, who had suggested he had faked his own bullying.
The federal court will be told on Friday the parties have reached a settlement and the high-profile Daily Telegraph
columnist has apologised on Twitter.
Devine retweeted the
Twitter user @bubblebathgirl, who claimed Quaden was an actor whose mother had posted a fake sobbing video and collected $300,000 in donations.
The columnist said: “That’s really rotten if this was a scam. Hurts genuine bullying victims.” Despite being told by theMedia Watch host, Paul Barry, and others, the claims were untrue she did not delete her tweets and said: “Typical of your sloppy research @therealpbarry. I never mentioned anything about age. Dishonest diversion.”
Devine appeared to link to the 19 September
Twitter apology from her online column in the Daily Telegraph on Wednesday, but at the time of writing the link goes through to Devine’s 22 September column. It is understood the link was part of the settlement agreement.
The settlement was reached after Justice Anna Katzmann found last month that Quaden had an
arguable case that he had been defamed by Devine.
The case had been hampered by News Corp refusing to accept service on behalf of their columnist and an inability to serve the documents on Devine in person because she is in New York covering the US election.
According to the statement of claim News Corp said it was not responsible for Devine’s account which was “self-evidently a personal account and is published by Twitter”.
Katzmann will hold a remote case management hearing on Friday morning at which Devine, who is on secondment for 18 months to Murdoch’s the New York Post, will be represented by Susan Goodman of Holding Redlich.
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Goodman told Guardian Australia her client’s matter was confidential and she could not comment.
News Corp did not respond to a request for comment.
The terms of the settlement will not be made public but Guardian Australia understands that Quaden and his mother, Yarraka Bayles, will each receive almost $100,000, with the child’s settlement to be held in trust until he is 18.
It is unclear whether Devine or News Corp Australia will pay the damages and costs.
A video by the Brisbane boy’s mother made global headlines in February after Quaden cried about being bullied at school and urged her to “give me a knife, I’m going to kill myself”.
The clip – used by Yarraka to highlight the effects of bullying –
was met with an outpouring of support.
“I’ve just picked my son up from school, witnessed a bullying episode, rang the principal, and I want people to know, parents, educators, teachers, this is the effect that bullying has,” Yarraka said in the video which went viral.
“Every single ... day, something happens. Another episode, another bullying, another taunt, another name-calling. Can you please educate your children, your families, your friends?”
In February the Murri boy, who dreams of becoming a professional rugby player,
walked on to the pitch with the players for an exhibition match in Queensland between Australia’s Indigenous All Stars, made up of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander players, and the New Zealand
Māori.
Yarraka said Quaden was “going from the worst day of his life to the best day of his life” after the match.
