A businesswoman has been awarded $280,000 after the Federal Court found she was defamed by a “sustained campaign of offensive mockery” that amounted to bullying in a series of columns in The Australian Financial Review.

Elaine Stead, the former managing director of venture capital at the now-defunct Blue Sky Alternative Investments, sued the newspaper and Rear Window columnist Joe Aston over two columns from 2019, one of which referred to her as a “feminist cretin”.

Last year, Justice Michael Lee found the columns conveyed a total of four defamatory imputations, including that Dr Stead is a “cretin” and “rashly destroyed the capital of business ventures with which she was associated”.

Source: https://www.theage.com.au/national/nsw/a-type-of-slow-death-elaine-stead-awarded-280-000-in-financial-review-defamation-case-20210127-p56x52.html