Defamation retrial sought
Invercargill city councillor Karen Arnold cannot see a rational explanation for a jury’s rejection of her defamation proceedings against Mayor Tim Shadbolt and Stuff, her lawyer says.
In the High Court at Wellington yesterday, Arnold’s lawyer, Peter McKnight, asked for a retrial. Justice Jill Mallon has reserved her decision.
McKnight told the judge that Arnold could not see a rational explanation for the jury’s decision in the High Court at Invercargill in March.
Arnold had sued Shadbolt and Stuff, formerly Fairfax Media, alleging defamation over comments made by Shadbolt in four columns published in The Southland Times in 2014 and 2015.
She said defamatory meanings could be drawn from the columns, which discussed her position on council matters, including the council’s trading company Holdco and a proposed ka¯ka¯po¯ display.
The jury found Arnold had proved some of the alleged meanings, but did not find any defamatory.
Yesterday, McKnight said the jury’s eight-hour deliberation seemed a long time just to decide what the words meant and whether they were defamatory.
He didn’t think the ‘‘rough and tumble of local body politics’’ affected the claim that the words used had been defamatory.
If there was an error there should be a retrial, he said.
Lawyers for Shadbolt and Stuff said no mistake had been made in the case and the jury’s verdict should stand.
Stuff’s lawyer, Robert Stewart, said it was not possible to now try to go behind the jury’s verdict and ‘‘nitpick’’.
Shadbolt’s lawyer, Felix Geiringer, said Shadbolt was said to be a famous exaggerator, so people may have said, ‘‘This is Mayor Shadbolt having one of his usual rants’’. That was a question for the jury to answer, he said.
Arnold faces what Geiringer described as an ‘‘embarrassing’’ costs bill for having her three weeks in court.
The judge was told that both the winning parties, Shadbolt and Stuff, were seeking to recover less than the twothirds of actual costs they could ask for, but even so Geiringer said it added up to an embarrassing amount of money. However, Shadbolt and Stuff had urged Arnold to take a different tack, and she agreed at the outset on the basis for fees to be calculated in the case, Geiringer said.