Unless you’ve been under a rock for the past few days, you’ve probably heard about *that* Mitchell Pearce incident, and you likely clicked on the video out of some kind of morbid curiosity. ‘NRL Player Drunkenly Pretends To Fuck A Dog’?! Who needs clickbait when you have IRL stories like that, honestly.
Anyway, since this ~ever-so-slight misdemeanour~, people have started to open discussion about whether it was legal to film Pearce while he did aforementioned shameful things, since it was inside a private residence, and a private conversation. Kinda like how police have to tell you before they record you – y’know?
And we were intrigued. We were stumped. Did the person who filmed Pearce technically do something illegal? Could Pearce potentially sue? Could he claim that the person defamed him?
So, PEDESTRIAN.TV spoke to Marque Lawyers, who cleared this shit right up for us.
“Well, it’s unlikely that any statements made in the video could be considered defamatory since most of the outrageous statements were made by Pearce himself,” said a statement from the legal team.
Michael Bradley, from Marque, said to P.TV that Pearce could potentially enter into a civil suit, but couldn’t sue:
“He could try on defamation basis to say the distribution of the video defamed him. And the other would be invasion of privacy, which is an undeveloped course of legal action but theoretically exists. There are very few cases that have been successful.
He may have reasonably expected this wouldn’t be – presumably if he was so inebriated he couldn’t rationally comprehend what was going on around him.If he’s saying ‘Yes I was a porkchop, but we were in a private home with a few friends, I didn’t think anyone would sell it’, well he could argue he wasn’t in a position to consent to anything.”
But what about about the fact that it was a private conversation in a private residence?
“It is a crime to record a conversation if it’s a private one. It applies to any sound recording, but it’s never been updated to deal with the camera phone situation. This wouldn’t be treated as a private conversation because there were other people there.”
Well, that settles that then.
Source: Marque Lawyers.
Photo: 9 News.
