Colin Craig wins defamation retrial

Former Conservative Party leader Colin Craig has won a retrial of the case in which he was accused of defaming Jordan Williams.

The bitter and hard fought case between Craig and Williams, the executive director of the Taxpayers’ Union, went all the way to the Supreme Court which yesterday found the High Court jury had been materially misdirected and the case should be run again.

In the first High Court case a jury had found overwhelmingly for Williams and awarded him $1.27 million damages.

The damages sum was all that Williams had claimed and set a record for defamation awards in New Zealand. The High Court judge said it was excessive, set it aside, and ordered a retrial of both the size of the award and whether Williams had been defamed at all.

The Court of Appeal refused to reinstate the damages but said only the part of the case that dealt with damages should be reheard.

Williams was at the Supreme Court in Wellington to hear its three-two majority decision delivered but left court with his phone held to his ear, walking past a journalist asking for comment.

The background to the case was Craig’s relationship with his former press secretary Rachel Macgregor, allegations that he had sexually harassed her and had not paid her properly. She resigned suddenly in September 2014, two days before the general election.

She later spoke to Williams, asking for secrecy, but Williams began divulging details to senior party officials in more serious terms than those Macgregor was later to recount to the jury in the defamation trial.

Williams was involved in blogposts about Craig being published on the Whale Oil website and around the same time in mid-2015 Craig stood aside from the party leadership. Craig responded with a press conference and a leaflet drop to 1.6 million homes, saying he was the victim of false allegations and a ‘‘dirty politics campaign’’, and making allegations against Williams.

Williams then sued him for defamation. Williams was a former supporter of the Conservative Party.

Out of some of the same facts Craig has sued Williams for defamation, a case which is still before the courts.