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AFL wife Nicole Cornes wins defamation suit against Ten over Mick Molloy joke
July 05, 2011
FORMER political candidate Nicole Cornes has successfully sued Channel Ten after alleging comedian Mick Molloy defamed her on its Before the Game football show.
Mrs Cornes, wife of former AFL coach Graham Cornes, was vindicated after winning a defamation suit over insinuations by Molloy on the Before the Game football show in June 2008.
Molloy suggested she had slept with former AFL player Stuart Dew, a friend of her stepson, Port Adelaide AFL footballer Chad Cornes.
``I just stood up for what I believed in,'' she told reporters on Tuesday after being awarded $85,000 damages in the Supreme Court of South Australia.
She had told the court she felt like a dirty joke when she saw the program.
``I felt that they were sexually ridiculing me for conduct that never happened ... and I was just a dirty joke and they were just laughing at me,'' she said in evidence.
``I just did not want to go out there and have to deal with people raising it, or talking about it, or whispering about it, or about you; questioning whether it's true.''
Her husband, a presenter with radio station 5AA Adelaide, told the court the ``staggering'' remark had ``sort of'' cast a shadow of doubt over his wife's fidelity even if he knew it was not true.
Molloy's on-air apology in September 2008 had not lessened the hurt, he said.
Ten's lawyer Dick Whitington QC argued the joke was not meant to be taken literally given the humorous context of the show.
He said it was pure absurdist humour that no ordinary reasonable person would take as a literal truth.
However Mrs Cornes' lawyer, Stuart Littlemore QC, had argued Molloy's joke was defamatory because it suggested Ms Cornes was promiscuous and committed adultery.
``His conduct in directing sexual ridicule to Mrs Cornes and traducing her good name for a laugh was not that of an entertainer but a lout.''
He said it was hard to imagine what worse defamation could be broadcast to impugn a woman's ``self-respect and dignity''.
Justice David Peek said Mrs Cornes was entitled to be vindicated.
He said she was entitled to a sum of money big enough to show people that ``the publishers were the losers and that the court clearly recognised that she had been wrongly defamed''.
Mrs Cornes was Labor's unsuccessful candidate for the Adelaide seat of Boothby at the 2007 federal election. She told the court she still had political ambitions.
The court judgment came as Network Ten began offering voluntary redundancies to staff as the cost cutting drive under interim chief executive Lachlan Murdoch gathers pace.
http://www.perthnow.com.au/entertai...il_nl&emcmp=PN&emchn=Newsletter&emlist=Member