McClintock: chortling over wins for Obeid
No-one has heard much from famous defamation wrangler Bruce McClintock for the better part of three years.
He retired from the bar at the end of 2021 and apart from being Inspector Bruce at the NSW Law Enforcement Conduct Commission and the Northern Territory Anti-Corruption Commission most unusually he’s avoided the spotlight.
That’s until lunchers at Sydney’s Union Club were lucky enough to have Bruce at the lectern to hear his speech titled “The Defamation Dilemma – Litigating in the World Defamation Capital”
One of the attendees at the lunch thought Bruce “had the audience eating out of his hand” – i.e. swallowing a lot of stuff that should not be swallowed.
His talk, accompanied by barramundi and fennel, was a mixture of law, war-stories, stand-up, and not a little ego.
He opened with a jab at one of his competitors, Stuart Littlemore, over an unseemly spat about which of them had mentored Celebrity Sue Chrysanthou.
“Bruce was never involved in helping Sue ‘come up’ through the ranks, nor the development of her expertise,” Littlemore purred to one of the hacks at The Australian.
“Sue worked more closely with me than anyone else. Early in her career we did a great deal of work together.”
A needled McClintock told the Union Club gathering that this was an “interesting” observation. Chrysanthou was also reported as announcing in a courtroom that “Bruce knows more about a woman’s body … than I do”.
Whatever was she getting at?
The retired silk was beside himself with suppressed mirth that he twice got sizeable damages for Eddie Obeid over Sydney Morning Herald articles that claimed he was corrupt.
This prompted Kate McClymont to go harder, with the result that the old crook wound up with a long stretch of porridge.
He had some knowing asides for the aficionados, attributing the overall decline in the number of defamation trials to the arrival of the “serious harm” hurdle for plaintiffs.
Fewer defamation cases can only be a good thing unless you are a lawyer earning fees from what Justice Ipp described as the “Galapagos Island Division of the Law”. To make up for fewer cases McClintock thinks awards of damages need to be much higher – of course he does.
As for the new defence of public interest journalism, which is supposed to balance the scales more fairly, Bruce was dismissive. The defence requires journalists to be cross-examined and the rusticated silk, smacking his lips, assured everything that will mean game over for media defendants.
He often advised people not to sue. It’s massively expensive, reputations are raked over, and the outcome risky. Frequently costs outweigh the award of damages. If only he had advised Roberts-Smith, Lehrmann, Uday Murdoch, and Oscar Wilde not to go into the cage for their hats.
He’s amazed that the barrister purportedly doing Lehrmann’s appeal wants to remain anonymous. He has never heard of anyone in Phillip Street ducking the opportunity for some self-basting promotion.
McClintock had been brutal in his cross-examination of women who brought complaints of sexually inappropriate behaviour against men, e.g. when the West Indian cricketer Chris Gayle sued The Age, which he described as a “fun” case. And the Geoffrey Rush trial with its wholesale assault on actor Eryn Jean Norvill.
Anyway, he’s as intrigued as everyone else as to how Dame Linda Reynolds will go in Western Australia, which “is a strange place”.
At one juncture in his talk, Bruce used the word “fuck”, in the context of discussing a case, which produced a pearl-clutching SHRIEK from a lady at the rear of the room.