Australian Media on Trial for Breaching Order in Pell Case

Crux ^ | 11/9/20 | Rod McGuirk

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CANBERRA, Australia — High-profile Australian journalists and large media organizations went on trial on Monday on charges that they breached a gag order on reporting about Cardinal George Pell’s sex abuse convictions in 2018 that have since been overturned.

A total of 18 individual journalists, editors and broadcasters face potential prison sentences and 12 organizations face fines if they are found guilty in the Victoria state Supreme Court of breaching a judge’s suppression order on Pell’s case. They have all pleaded not guilty.

Justice John Dixon is hearing the trial without a jury and via video links due to pandemic restrictions. The trial is expected to take two to three weeks.

Such suppression orders are common in the Australian and British judicial systems. But the enormous international interest in an Australian criminal trial with global ramifications highlighted the difficulty in enforcing such orders in the digital age.

Pell was convicted on Dec. 11, 2018, of sexually abusing two choirboys in a Melbourne cathedral when he the city’s archbishop in the late 1990s.

The trial of Pope Francis’s former finance minister and the most senior Catholic to be charged with child sex abuse had not been reported in the news media because of a suppression order that forbid publication of details in any format that could be accessed from Australia.

Details were suppressed to prevent prejudicing jurors in a second child abuse trial that Pell was to face three months later.

That second trial was cancelled due to a lack of evidence and Australia’s High Court in April overturned all convictions after Pell had spent 13 months in prison.

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