Paul Oulton and Anne Cao outside the High Court at Hamilton where they took a claim against Stuff Ltd for defamation. The husband and wife were organisers of the Waikato Cherry Tree Festival that was cancelled at the last minute in September 2019. Photo / Natalie Akoorie
Paul Oulton and Anne Cao outside the High Court at Hamilton where they took a claim against Stuff Ltd for defamation. The husband and wife were organisers of the Waikato Cherry Tree Festival that was cancelled at the last minute in September 2019. Photo / Natalie Akoorie
Stuff and one of its former reporters defamed the organisers of an iconic cherry tree festival in an article published in 2019 leading up to the event’s last-minute cancellation.
But a jury in the High Court at Hamilton found only one line in the article was defamatory and that the harm it caused was more than minor.
It means the claim by Anne Cao and husband Paul Oulton that Stuff and Gary Farrow’s articles and a later podcast by Farrow were defamatory and caused them reputational damage, was largely unsuccessful.
The verdicts on Thursday morning follow a day of deliberations and an eight-day civil trial in front of Justice David Johnstone.
There were six articles in question, five written by Farrow in 2019, relating to the Waikato Cherry Tree Festival at Matangi, on the outskirts of Hamilton, that was set to run over 10 days in September that year.
However, the festival was cancelled the day before it was due to start when Cao and Oulton failed to get resource consent for the expanded event, having successfully run it under Waikato District Council’s temporary events provision in 2017 and 2018.
But with up to 12,000 people expected, the upscaled event required resource consent, and when that was not secured in time a plan to return to the smaller festival format was abandoned when the couple received an abatement notice outlining the penalties liable if Cao and Oulton breached the temporary event rules.
Stuff said they were simply reporting the facts of the situation at the time and raised a defence of responsible communication.
The jury largely agreed finding that although some statements in the articles were defamatory the harm was no more than minor.
However, they found in a September 15, 2020 article a statement that the couple did not have resource consent for the festival in 2017 and 2018 defamed them because resource consent for those smaller scale events was not required.
On this, they said Stuff and Farrow had not proved the harm was not more than minor.
Justice Johnstone earlier summed up the closing submissions for the jury.
Lawyer Kalev Crossland for Cao and Oulton said Stuff and Farrow’s articles presented a very one-sided story and the words used were “coloured by slant or the angle” taken by the media company and its former reporter.
Summarising Crossland, Justice Johnstone said one sentence in particular in one of the stories, which included that ticketholders would only get half of their money back but was incorrect, painted Cao and Oulton in a negative light.
Other statements that money was owed to performers and whether any money had been repaid conveyed a question mark over the couple’s integrity that would “inevitably injure anyone’s reputation”.
It was “entirely appropriate” for reasonable readers to take these meanings from the articles, lowering the reputation of the plaintiffs, Crossland submitted.
Anne Cao and her husband Paul Oulton are the organisers of the Cherry Blossom Festival at English Cherry Tree Manor. Photo / Danielle Zollickhofer
Oulton’s evidence that he was called a liar in his local supermarket after the cancelled event went unchallenged in court, and the plaintiffs blamed the articles for the negative public backlash, which included stories in Chinese media.
“We should be slow to point the finger at Ms Cao and Mr Oulton as they are victims of abuse.”
It was up to Stuff and Farrow to prove that such harm caused by their news articles was not more than minor, Crossland had said.
In defence of Stuff and Farrow, barrister Robert Stewart submitted there would need to be “strained or forced” reading between the lines of the articles to believe they could mean what the plaintiffs claimed.
Stewart invited the jury to look at the words actually used and consider what an ordinary and reasonable reader would take from them.
For example, the allegation that the first article in question published on September 15, 2019, portrayed the plaintiffs as acting without integrity, loyalty, and acting dishonestly, never used those words.
With regard to defamation, Stewart said the jury would need to carefully consider whether the meaning of the stories reasonably lowered the readers’ view of Cao and Oulton.
If the jury found there had been defamation, they would need to determine whether any harm caused by the defamation was more than minor.
Justice Johnstone said Stewart maintained in closing submissions that it was Cao and Oulton who caused their own reputational damage, and not Stuff and Farrow.
“Ms Cao and Mr Oulton were the people who decided to promote their expanded festival, and to sell tickets to, 10 days before having any justifiable confidence they would get resource consent,” the judge said, according to Stewart’s closing statements.
The resource consent and fees were not filed until the end of July 2019, less than two months before the festival was due to open on September 20.
The court heard the couple’s “plan B” to scale back the festival to three days to meet the council’s temporary event provisions, as it had been run the two years prior, was “never realistic”.
Once resource consent became unachievable the festival had to be cancelled, the day before it was due to start, Stewart earlier told the jury.
It was Cao and Oulton who made the announcement on Facebook about the cancelled event through Cao’s NZ Pure Tours company, not Stuff and Farrow.
“They simply passed that news on.”
It was Cao and Oulton who advised ticketholders they would only get a partial refund.
An edit made to one of Farrow’s stories by Waikato Times chief news director Wayne Timmo to say that ticketholders would only receive half the ticket price in refund was inserted into the story only after one or two comments on Facebook indicating that was the case.
And it was Cao and Oulton who put NZ Pure Tours into liquidation and advised Farrow of this the night before.
Meanwhile, the case is not yet over because in determining liability Justice Johnstone must determine whether or not the affirmative defence of responsible communication can be argued.
This is expected to be heard over the next day with Farrow taking the stand to be cross-examined again.
Natalie Akoorie is the Open Justice deputy editor, based in Waikato and covering crime and justice nationally. Natalie first joined the Herald in 2011 and has been a journalist in New Zealand and overseas for 28 years, recently covering health, social issues, local government, and the regions.
