Record jury award ‘not as directed’
A jury that awarded the largest defamation damages in New Zealand to Taxpayers’ Union co-founder Jordan Williams must have gone against the judge’s directions, an appeal hearing has been told.
Conservative Party founder and former leader Colin Craig lost the case Williams took against him, with the jury awarding the full damages sought. The trial judge thought them so out of kilter with past cases that she set them aside.
Williams has now gone to the Court of Appeal to have the $1.27 million reinstated, but a more likely outcome may be that the case is reheard, perhaps in a limited form.
Williams’ lawyer, Peter McKnight, suggested the Court of Appeal could assess the damages, or another High Court jury could be asked to do so, using the first jury’s findings of facts, and hearing evidence only from Williams and Craig. Craig objected to having the trial judge set damages.
Craig’s lawyer, Stephen Mills, QC, thought the case should be started again. The first jury’s decisions looked as if they had not followed the judge’s directions.
Mills said that, after the jury finished its work at the High Court in Auckland in 2016, Justice Sarah Katz had commented that the jury must have hated Craig to have decided as it did.
However, McKnight produced a transcript of what was said after the verdicts, in an attempt to dispute that reported remark.
While the size of the award was compared with others, one of the judges, Justice Forrie Miller, said some of the comparison cases seemed distinctly worse, with the Williams and Craig case being like a political spat where there was a sense in which some of it might have been legitimate political discourse. He said ‘‘spat’’ was not meant in a pejorative way.
McKnight said Williams did not see it as a spat.
‘‘It was a very, very serious matter,’’ McKnight said.
Another of the judges, Justice Rhys Harrison, said, as often happened in defamation cases, the parties saw it in an intense and personal way, while those at a distance could see it differently.
Mills said Williams’ ‘‘attack’’ on Craig came when the Conservative Party was polling at 4.7 per cent and was a serious contender for Parliament.
Early in the appeal hearing, Justice Harrison said the court recognised the integrity of the jury’s verdict on Craig’s liability, and its provisional view was that Williams was entitled to that verdict unless the court was persuaded Justice Katz had made a wrong legal ruling on one of Craig’s potential defences.
Mills said the judge had misdirected the jury about a possible defence, but he also agreed that it appeared the jury did not follow the judge’s directions in any event.
Williams had sued Craig for defamation arising from remarks made at a press conference and in a leaflet, which Craig spent $300,000 delivering nationwide in mid-2015.
The background to the case was Craig’s relationship with his former press secretary, Rachel MacGregor, which he agreed had been inappropriate for a married man. She made a sexual harassment claim against him with the Human Rights Tribunal.
Craig denied sexual harassment, and the claim was settled at mediation. It was agreed the subject would not be publicly discussed by either of them.
But MacGregor had already confided in Williams, and Williams believed Craig was not fit to lead the Conservative Party, the judge said.
Justice Katz said there were factual disputes about what Williams said to various people, but it was clear there was a ‘‘significant disconnect’’ between what MacGregor alleged and the more serious allegations that Williams made about what had happened.
Williams also sent a draft blog post to Cameron Slater for publication on the Whale-Oil website, which was published as Craig called a press conference to announce he was stepping aside as Conservative Party leader, she said.
Craig’s remarks at the press conference, and the leaflet that was distributed, formed the basis for Williams’ defamation claim.
The appeal hearing continues today.