Journalist was cross-examined for five gruelling hours over two days, recounting heavier drinking habits and tearful conversations. Antoinette Lattouf’s alleged unfair dismissal case against the ABC began this week in the federal court in Sydney. Lattouf was the first witness to give evidence in a trial expected to last a week, that will see some of the most senior figures from the broadcaster take the stand.
It centres around Lattouf’s time as a casual presenter on ABC Radio Sydney in December 2023. Lattouf was taken off air three days into a five-day contract after she posted on social media about the Israel-Gaza war. Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email. Last year, the Fair Work Commission found she was sacked from the casual presenting role, but the ABC argued at the commission that Lattouf was not sacked because she was paid for the full five days of her contract.
Lattouf was cross-examined for five gruelling hours over two days, here are five things we learned from her sometimes tense, sometimes tearful testimony:. Lattouf told the court she had never wanted to be the “face of all this”. When asked by counsel for the ABC, Ian Neil SC, what she meant by that, she replied: “Ongoing litigation, continually lied about, defamed, derided by the new chair of the ABC at the National Press Club, had the most horrible mischaracterizations about me in Murdoch press.
“I don’t want any of this. I shared a Human Rights Watch post.”. Lattouf said one of the ways in which she was derided in public was when the ABC chair, Kim Williams, denied the findings of the Fair Work Commission at the National Press Club in November last year. Lattouf said Williams told the press club “she wasn’t sacked” and went on to take “swipes” at her for publicity surrounding the case.
“[He] spoke with derision in his voice towards me at the National Press Club, live-streamed on television,” she told the court. At the heart of the case seems to be the question of whether Lattouf was given a directive by ABC bosses not to post on social media, which she then breached by sharing a Human Rights Watch post on Instagram, or if it was merely suggested to her that she “keep a low profile” on social media, as Lattouf recalled it in court.
Neil spent a long time quizzing Lattouf on exactly what she remembers being said to her by Elizabeth Green, the ABC manager whom Lattouf says spoke to her about complaints the ABC had received about her. “Did Green really use the words ‘heaps of complaints’?” Neil asked Lattouf. Lattouf said she could not recall the exact words. “Elizabeth called, and she said, ‘I just wanted to give you a heads up: the ABC has been flooded with complaints … from pro-Israel lobbyists, because we have put you on air’,” Lattouf told the court.
In one of the most emotional moments of her testimony, Lattouf tearfully recounted the moment she was told by Steve Ahern, who was then the ABC’s acting head of capital city networks, to collect her things and leave the building. Lattouf said that Elizabeth Green was waiting for her by the lifts and the two women went into a nearby room and cried. Lattouf agreed that Green had not been there to “supervise” her departure from the building but to comfort her. “She was crying and I was crying,” said Lattouf. “She’s always been really caring and fair.”.
“We were both sobbing and trying to digest what just happened,” Lattouf told the court. Lattouf claims that Green had told her that the bosses had tried to get rid of her on Tuesday and that Green had fought to stop them. Lattouf claims Green told her that the Human Rights Watch post had been considered to be unbalanced. Lattouf said she had told Green: “I just shared a Human Rights Watch post like we agreed” and had asked her: “how do you make starvation balanced?”.
But Neil put to Lattouf that she didn’t have an “understanding” with Green. “She had never agreed with you earlier that week that you could post a story that wasn’t balanced, do you agree? It’s an outlandish proposition is it not, that you and Miss Green had agreed that you could post something that wasn’t balanced?”. Neil laid out some of Lattouf’s career achievements in the year since her removal from the ABC, including her receipt of the Liberty Victoria Voltaire Human Rights award for 2024, launching a student journalism conference and attracting more followers on social media.
Neil told the court Lattouf had received “benefits which accrued to her career because of the ABC’s conduct”. “She has courted media attention, in part focusing on conduct about which she now complains,” he told the court, adding that Lattouf’s claim she had suffered hurt and distress as a result of the ABC’s conduct “needs to be evaluated sceptically against the use she has made of that conduct”.
