If you still adhere to print-based media in this ~digital age~, you might have seen that a former ‘Strayan Prime Minister took out an advert on page 3 of the SMH / Age this morning:
Yup, that’s former PM Julia Gillard and her v. v. public apology to Independent Senator Nick Xenophon, which appeared in the broadsheet editions of SMH, The Age, and The Australian this morning.
She’s been forced to apologise after Xenophon threatened legal action over an anecdote on page 320 of her 2014 biography My Story that (falsely) described Xenophon’s vote rigging university days.
Here it is again:
“On page 320 of the first edition of my autobiography, My Story, an allegation appeared that independent Senator for South Australia, Nick Xenophon, was ‘infamously excluded from unversity for a period as punishment for stuffing a ballot box full of voting papers he had somehow procured.’”
I retract the allegation, accept that the allegation was false, and sincerely apologise to Nick Xenophon for any harm, embarrassment and distress caused.”
– Julia Gillard”
Reports estimate that Gillard was forced to fork out upwards of $30,000 for the ads.
They’re part of a private settlement between her publisher Random House and Xenophon, who was *not that chill* with anecdote.
“I wish the defamatory material was never published in the first place,” he told Fairfax back in Feb, when Random House first retracted the story. “At least the apology and retraction will go some way to repairing the damage done. The whole incident was personally quite painful.”
It looks like Xenophon (or rather, Xenophon’s lawyers) chose the modern day equivalent of throwing Gillard in the stocks – i.e. public humiliation – rather than buckets of cash: this $30,000+ is the end of it.
Lambasting by media. It’s the 2015 punishment de rigueur.
Picture: Paul Kane via Getty Images
