One of the longest-running defamation trials in Australia has finally reached its conclusion, with Nine Entertainment winning out in court over high-profile prosthetic surgeon Dr Munjed Al Muderis. 

Al Muderis sued Nine, The Age investigative reporter Charlotte Grieve, 60 Minutes journalist Tom Steinfort, and 60 Minutes associate producer Natalie Clancy over an episode and teaser promotion of a 60 Minutes episode and accompanying articles published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in September 2022. 

Last Friday, Justice Wendy Abraham in the Federal Court found in a 770-page judgment in favour of the reporters, marking the first win for the public interest defence introduced in a suite of 2021 defamation law reforms. 

Who is Al Muderis and why did he sue? 

Al Muderis came to prominence a decade ago after releasing a book about his experiences fleeing Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as a first-year medical resident after refusing decrees to amputate the ears of draft evaders in 1999. Coming to Australia by boat as a refugee, his medical career led to him becoming known as one of the world’s leading practitioners of osseointegration surgery — the insertion of prosthetic implants directly into bones. 

One of Al Muderis’ most high-profile patients was Labor MP Ali France, who unseated former opposition leader Peter Dutton in the seat of Dickson at the last federal election. France lost her left leg in 2011 in a carpark accident and was operated on by Al Muderis. She has spoken at length publicly about her belief that she owes her “ability to walk” to him. 

Al Muderis claimed Nine’s reporters defamed him as a negligent surgeon who pressured his patients into procedures and deliberately misled them about his surgical abilities. He claimed 75 defamatory imputations in his statement of claim. 

Some of the other claims he made against the Nine publications were that they portrayed him as having “abandoned his patient[s]”, that he “prioritises money over his patients’ care”, “made fun of his patient[s’] concerns about an infected wound”, and that he “preyed on patients who were vulnerable both physically and mentally”.

One surgeon featured in the publications claimed Al Muderis performed surgery on a psychotic homeless patient, who was found 72 hours post-operation walking around a train station on an infected stump. 

What was Nine’s defence? 

Nine relied on three defences: contextual truth, honest opinion and public interest. Justice Abraham found that the defences of both contextual truth and public interest was made out, rendering the defence of honest opinion unnecessary to consider. 

Contextual truth is a defence to defamation if the defendant can prove that the relevant matter is substantially true, and anything that isn’t substantially true doesn’t further harm a complainant’s reputation beyond what the substantially true material does. 

“In respect to each publication … the defamatory imputations do not further harm the reputation of the applicant,” Abraham found. 

What is the public interest defence?

The public interest defence is a relatively new introduced element of the Defamation Act, and states that it is a defence to a defamatory matter if the defendant proves that “the matter concerns an issue of public interest” and the defendant “reasonably believed that the publication of the matter was in the public interest”. 

This marks the first win for the public interest defence since it was introduced in 2021.

Famously, in the case of former commando Heston Russell and the ABC, Justice Michael Lee found that the journalists had a belief in the public interest of publication that was “not reasonable in the circumstances”. 

“In a case like this, where you have a surgeon operating on members of the public and doing so repeatedly, and there being concerns about that … then the subject matter of the publications are clearly matters of public interest,” University of Sydney defamation law professor David Rolph told Crikey. 

When it comes to the standard of a publisher’s “reasonable belief”, Rolph said that this case “gives an example of the sort of journalism that would meet the standard” for having acted reasonably. 

What does this mean for public interest journalism? 

Regarding the implications for free speech and public interest journalism in Australia, Rolph said it would “cause potential plaintiffs to think twice before undertaking the very large risk of suing for defamation”.

“The cumulative effect of losses by high-profile defamation plaintiffs over the last two to three years [including Ben Roberts-Smith and Bruce Lehrmann], including in this case, has a chilling effect.

“It’s clear from the judgment that the public interest defence is new and demands a new approach, and that it’s not business as usual. Al Muderis is a landmark judgment because it signals a liberalising of defamation laws to public interest journalism, and that is obviously a benefit for freedom of speech and freedom of the press.” 

What was it like inside the bubble of the case? 

“We always sort of knew he was a litigious person,” Age journalist Charlotte Grieve tells Crikey. 

Grieve said it took “a huge amount of time and energy” in preparing for what turned out to be Australia’s third-longest defamation trial, and one in which Grieve’s six-day cross-examination set a record for the longest cross-examination of any Australian journalist. 

The case, which involved 14 solicitors and 10 barristers, had a cumulated estimated cost to both sides of $19 million, and spurred Grieve onto further reporting on healthcare regulation. Grieve’s reporting on the case has resulted in a book deal with Hachette, with Duty to Warn set to release in January 2026. 

Asked whether she ever feared losing, Grieve said she was “always extremely confident in the work and the stories of the patients … I knew that they were always telling the truth, and I knew that he had lied to us and to patients. 

“I’m just really glad that the courts have now seen that.”