Miranda Devine has given her apology to a nine-year-old boy with dwarfism and his mother, who claims the columnist had defamed them. Devine, who did not send a lawyer for the preliminary defamation hearing in August, acknowledged the legal case in a tweet and mentioned that her previous comments were 'hurtful', as per reports.
She stated that her comments that allegedly suggested Yarraka Bayles had trained her son Quaden for falsely claiming he got bullied in a video she posted online. "In February this year I posted some comments on my personal Twitter account about Quaden Bayles and his mother Yarraka. I now know those comments were hurtful and untrue," Devine mentioned on Saturday. "I sincerely apologise to the Bayles for those comments," she added.
Devine Apologizes to Quaden
In February, the child made the headlines around the world when he appeared in a clip crying about being bullied at school, Quaden urged Yarraka to give him a knife so that he can kill himself. Yarraka in the video said, "I've just picked my son up from school, witnessed a bullying episode, rang the principal, and I want people to know, parents, educators, teachers, this is the effect that bullying has."
The video went viral and it garnered lot of support for the boy but the tweet of Bayles' state Devine later tweeted suggestions that it was all a false video and the indigenous Brisbane boy born with a form of dwarfism was actually an adult actor. After one of the followers of Devine replied, "It's a crime if it is a scam. Child abuse. How could anyone parent do this?", the columnist of News Corp tweeted. Devine is a columnist for the Daily Telegraph of Sydney.
During a hearing in August, the federal court heard that the columnist had acknowledged that she had been given court documents sent to her by email in April. Talking about the lack of response by Devine, the representative of Bayles, Barrister Sue Chrysanthou said, "Unusually for her, she has been silent. We don't know why we haven't heard anything from her."
At a later hearing, Justice Anna Katzmann said alleged defamatory means were probably going to lead to an ordinary reasonable person thinking less about Quaden. The justice gave approval to the moves to have the documents physically served to the columnist. During the hearing, a lawyer from the Daily Telegraph told the court that he did not have the authorisation to accept service on Devine's behalf.
