Channel Seven has threatened Amber Harrison – the former mistress to the network’s CEO, Tim Worner – with contempt of court charges after she again tweeted disparaging comments about Seven management.
If Harrison is seen to be in contempt she could face the prospect of a jail term. Lawyers have ordered the tweets be removed; however, when B&T checked, Harrison was yet to do so.
A month ago, Harrison even told The Australian she was prepared to “go to jail to defend my right to have an opinion”.
According to a report on News.com.au, Seven’s lawyers sent Harrison a letter on Tuesday accusing her of “a blatant breach of the orders made against you by Justice Sackar on 17 July 2017″.
Harrison has a court-ordered suppression order that prevents her from speaking about or posting sensitive information from her time at Seven or her affair with Worner. Harrison has also been ordered to pay Seven’s legal costs, something it hasn’t enforced, nor could she afford to do as it amounts to several hundreds of thousands of dollars. Harrison is reportedly broke and unemployed.
A quick check of Harrison’s Twitter page reveals a number of veiled digs at Seven management, particularly in light of the recent and unsavoury Harvey Weinstein and Don Burke revelations.
However, the two tweets that Seven’s lawyers appear to have taken umbrage to relate to former Seven reporter, Amy Taeuber, who didn’t have her contract renewed after she made harassment complaints about the network. The second dates back to 2010 and the then host of Seven’s X Factor, Matthew Newton, who was charged with domestic violence against his former fiancée, the actress Brooke Satchwell, and a former girlfriend, Rachael Taylor.
In the letter to Harrison, that has been seen by a News journalist, Johson Winter & Slattery Lawyers remind Harrison that she had “consented” to be “permanently restrained from either directly or indirectly, giving any interviews to any medium or media, or from making, authorising or procuring any public statement, publication, off the record comment, background information, publications, press releases, press conferences, or from participating in social media about the Company.”
The letter concludes that “your tweet regarding Matthew Newton is false and misleading” and “our clients consider these ongoing breaches amount to you acting in contempt of the Orders made against you, particularly in the face of repeated written warnings as to the nature of your conduct.”
Harrison herself told News.com.au: “Channel Seven are kidding themselves if they think a court order is going to suppress the truth and protect corporate cover ups past, current or future in the present climate. It doesn’t work. It is a failed tactic. I will continue to speak out and I’m not removing tweets.”
In August, rogue blogger and self-confessed “citizen journalist”, Shane Dowling, was jailed for the three months for contempt of court after he published the names of Channel Seven on-air talent that Harrison had wrongly accused Worner of also having had affairs with.
