Cruise giants Royal Caribbean initially refused to accept the authenticity of a video shot by a Whakaari/White Island victim on the day she died, as they fought a multimillion-dollar civil case to reduce their company’s liability.
The stance meant lawyers acting for the Melbourne-based Browitt family had to get testimony from a grieving woman – who lost four loved ones in the tragedy across two generations – that a voice captured in the clip shot by Krystal Browitt was her late daughter’s voice.
The claims have emerged in a new book Out of the Ashes by Stephanie Browitt, about her fight for life and recovery after the 2019 eruption that claimed the lives of 22 people on Whakaari/White Island.
It is co-written by her mother, Marie Browitt, who also talks about the pain of losing her husband Paul, their younger daughter Krystal, and the family’s long fight for justice against Royal Caribbean in courtrooms in Australia and America.
The Browitts were passengers on Royal Caribbean’s Ovation of the Seas, and paid the cruise company extra for the optional excursion.
Krystal died on the island, Paul died in hospital several weeks later and Stephanie suffered burns to 70% of her body and had eight fingers amputated.
Marie was the only family member not to go on the ill-fated island excursion.
The family’s legal battle ended on September 17, 2024, just before a jury trial in Miami’s 11th Judicial Court of Florida was to begin.
The Browitts accepted an out-of-court settlement from Royal Caribbean, rather than continuing in court with their attempts to prove that the company didn’t properly warn them of the dangers they could face on White Island.
The size of the settlement is confidential, but it left the Browitts free to tell their story.
Their legal team – headed by prominent Melbourne class action lawyer Peter Gordon - has contributed information to Out of the Ashes about the legal obstacles the mother and daughter faced as they sought justice.
Marie wrote in the book that during the legal battle they experienced moments she felt were “cruel, callous and incredibly disrespectful”.
That included the cruise company questioning the authenticity of a video shot by Krystal shortly before the devastating eruption.
A tour guide can be heard saying to American tourist Barbara Hollander: “The higher the level, the more risk there is of an eruption. Level 3 is an eruption. We are on level 2 nearing level 3 now”.
“It was a crucial piece of evidence,” Stephanie wrote in Out of the Ashes.
“We knew that, and Royal Caribbean moved heaven and earth to exclude it from our case in one of their motions.”
Stephanie said the company’s argument was initially around the “chain of custody” of the phone the video was shot on, saying no one could be sure it was actually Krystal’s, despite it having thousands of Browitt family pictures on it.
“Next, they said there was no good evidence it was a video of White Island that day,” she wrote.
“Just think about that ... how many other places that day (the metadata said the video was taken in New Zealand on 9 December 2019) could have had tourists on an identical landscape, wearing gas masks and with tour guides, a description of the alert level and a crater lake and a volcano?”
Stephanie said the company’s legal team challenged them to prove the identity of the person the guide was talking to.
“Our lawyers knew that voice belonged to Barbara Hollander, who died with her family that day,” Stephanie wrote.
“Royal Caribbean didn’t care.
“At one point [our lawyers] said to their counterparts, ‘Don’t make us go to Mrs Hollander’s elderly mum, make her listen to the video and get evidence to prove it’s her daughter’s voice’.
“But that’s exactly what Royal demanded.”
Hollander died in the tragedy along with her husband Martin and their teenage sons Berend, 16, and Matthew, 13.
Stephanie said she and her mum were “forever grateful” to Hollander’s mum for watching the video and confirming it was her daughter’s voice on it.
Marie claimed that for the four years leading up to the out-of-court settlement; “it was up against the ropes with Royal Caribbean swinging courtroom haymakers at us and looking for a knock-out punch to send us back to Melbourne, penniless and defeated”.
Royal Caribbean did not respond to a detailed request for comment from the Herald about the contents of Out of the Ashes.
Previously, after their out-of-court settlement in 2024, the company also declined Herald requests for comment.
Marie wrote that in the immediate weeks after the eruption, “my phone was full of messages from lawyers offering to represent us”.
She initially ignored them all to focus on her gravely ill husband and daughter.
Months later, with Stephanie “seething with anger” that Royal Caribbean had offered the trips to the island, she decided to start the legal process.
She chose Gordon - who had received a lot of attention after earlier saving the Footscray Bulldogs Football Club from collapse - to lead the case.
Paul Browitt had been an avid AFL fan.
“He explained in detail the process of suing a company like Royal Caribbean, and what would happen if we decided to go ahead and take on a highly litigious, billion-dollar company based in Florida,” Marie wrote in Out of the Ashes of her early conversations with Gordon.
Marie explained that the Browitts were told that Royal Caribbean had “an army of highly paid lawyers at their disposal, and a reputation for going to great lengths to deter people like us from suing them”.
The challenges the Browitts faced in the legal wrangle that followed over the next four years fulfilled Gordon’s warning.
That included how Royal Caribbean took their own legal action against the Browitts shortly after the first anniversary of the tragedy.
The move saw the cruise company file a lawsuit to try and stop the Browitts’ case being heard in America, and to seek legal costs from the grieving family.
“Behind the pages and pages of Royal Caribbean’s legal jargon was a very simple underlying message: this billion-dollar behemoth would fight a widow and grieving mother, and her daughter, who’d suffered horrific, life-changing burns, every step of the way.
“[This] only made Stephanie and me more determined to seek justice. After all, my family had been destroyed, and Stephanie’s life was changed forever – we had nothing left to lose.”
During the legal process, Royal Caribbean also had Stephanie assessed by their chosen medical experts, including a psychiatrist.
“Apparently, the lovely cruise liner had doubts I had suffered any mental trauma on account of what I’d been through,” Stephanie wrote.
In a chapter charting the ill-fated cruise in the days leading up to the eruption, the book traces how the Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences (GNS) had observed and communicated a spike in activity on Whakaari/White Island on the eve of the eruption.
On the morning of the tragedy, GNS listed the island’s volcanic alert at “moderate to heightened volcanic unrest”.
It later emerged in the court case that Royal Caribbean was not following the safety alerts.
Stephanie wrote that the first time anyone flagged how potentially dangerous Whakaari/White Island could be was when she, her father, and younger sister were already on the island.
A guide told them the “eruption warning had recently been lifted to a level two, and because of that, we’d have to do the tour a little faster than normal”.
“Dad and I locked eyes and I knew what he was thinking,” Stephanie wrote in Out of the Ashes. “Why didn’t someone say something before? And what did level two even mean?
“Surely they wouldn’t sell tickets to an excursion that wasn’t safe.”
Out of the Ashes by Stephanie and Marie Browitt, is published by HarperCollins and has a RRP of $39.99.
Neil Reid is a Napier-based senior reporter who covers general news, features and sport. He joined the Herald in 2014 and has 34 years of newsroom experience. He has covered the Whakaari/White Island tragedy, and its ongoing impacts, at length.
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