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Media fronts court in George Pell contempt trial
Conspiracies that media companies wanted to protect the Catholic Church were behind one newspaper’s decision to print an article on Cardinal George Pell’s now-overturned, child sex abuse charges, the Victorian Supreme Court has heard.
Naomi Neilson
Then-editor of The Age Alex Lavelle has become the first of the accused journalists to front the Supreme Court for potential breaches of the suppression order protecting the cardinal. Mr Lavelle has told the court that he believed sufficient legal advice and social media comments justified the decision to publish the December 2018 article.
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Mr Lavelle said that while The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald newsrooms talked about holding off on publishing the article on the day of the verdict, details of the verdict were picked up by an overseas publication and sparked discussions in Australia. New media reports confirmed that, with the belief it had leaked already, they should publish.
“It was never an intention to write the story about what happened in the Pell trial, [and] the possibility was that because of the extent of social media discussion of this story – potentially it could come to the point that I or The Age could consider it was a possibility to run a story in some form,” Mr Lavelle told the court.
The article ultimately ran after having been read by lawyers in Melbourne and Sydney, who advised that the article could be published without naming Cardinal Pell.
Mr Lavelle also attributed the decision to publish to readers’ comments that not posting any news about the trial was part of a “Catholic conspiracy” to protect the church.
