Peros v Nationwide News Pty Ltd (No 3)

In the case of Peros v Nationwide News Pty Ltd (No 3), the plaintiff, William Daniel Peros, sought to establish that the defendants had defamed him in a podcast series. Peros had been acquitted of murdering Ms Shandee Blackburn, but a Coroner had found that he had killed her using a bladed instrument. The defendants published an investigative podcast series into the killing, and Peros claimed that Episode 13 of the series imputed that he had murdered Ms Blackburn, causing or likely to cause serious harm to his reputation. The defendants argued that Peros' reputation had already been practically destroyed by the widespread reporting of the Coroner’s finding, and thus the episode did not cause serious harm. The court was required to determine whether Peros had established the serious harm element of his cause of action against the defendants.

The court found that prior to the publication of Episode 13, numerous other publications, including the first 12 episodes of the podcast, had already seriously injured Peros' reputation. Listeners to the podcast series had concluded that Peros was the person who the Coroner had found to have violently killed Ms Blackburn. However, the court held that Episode 13 continued a theme that the jury at the murder trial did not hear a great deal of the evidence that was potentially available at the time of the trial, but was either not relied upon by the prosecution or excluded from the evidence as the result of principles governing criminal trials and rulings by the trial judge. The court found that Episode 13 was likely to cause serious harm to Peros' reputation because it reinforced the impression that Peros was the killer, despite his acquittal.

The court concluded that Peros had established the serious harm element of his cause of action against the defendants over Episode 13. The proceeding was dismissed.