Miranda Devine apologises for Quaden Bayles tweets amid defamation case

Miranda Devine has apologised to a nine-year-old Indigenous boy with dwarfism and his mother, who claims the columnist defamed them.

Devine, who did not send a lawyer to a preliminary defamation hearing in August, appeared to acknowledge the legal case in a tweet on Saturday, and said her previous comments had been “hurtful”.

She said her comments, which allegedly suggested Yarraka Bayles had coached her son Quaden to falsely claim he had been bullied in a video she later posted online, were “untrue”.

“In February this year I posted some comments on my personal Twitter account about Quaden Bayles and his mother Yarraka. I now know those comments were hurtful and untrue,” Devine said on Saturday.

“I sincerely apologise to the Bayles for those comments,” she said.

In February, Quaden made global headlines when he appeared in the video, inconsolable and crying, about being bullied at school. Quaden urged Yarraka to “give me a knife, I’m going to kill myself”.

In the video, Yarraka said: “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.”

The clip was met with an outpouring of support, but the Bayles’ say Devine later tweeted suggestions it was all a scam and that the Indigenous Brisbane boy born with a common form of dwarfism was actually an adult actor.

When one of Devine’s 71,000 followers replied “it’s a crime if it is a scam. Child abuse. How could anyone parent do this?”, the News Corp columnist tweeted “Yep. Exactly. On the case”, Justice Anna Katzmann was told during a preliminary hearing in August.

Devine is a columnist for Sydney’s Daily Telegraph. She is currently on secondment for the New York Post, a masthead also owned by News Corp in the US.

At a hearing in August, the fed

eral court heard that Devine had not acknowledged she’d been served court documents sent to her by email in April.

Speaking about Devine’s lack of response, Barrister Sue Chrysanthou, who is representing the Bayles, said “unusually for her, she has been silent”.

“We don’t know why we haven’t heard anything from her,” Chrysanthou said.

At a later hearing, Katzmann said alleged defamatory meanings were likely to lead to an ordinary reasonable person thinking less of Quaden.

Katzmann approved moves to have the documents physically served to the New York-based columnist.

During the hearing, a lawyer for the Daily Telegraph, which was also named as a defendant to the defamation case, told the court he was not authorised to accept service on Devine’s behalf.