The war hero who missed his own day of reckoning

Ben Roberts-Smith was lauded as the nation’s most valorous soldier – until a judge ruled he probably murdered unarmed civilians in Afghanistan

- Ben Doherty

In the end, the attention was on the man who wasn’t there. All two metres of Ben Roberts-Smith was glaringly absent from the packed, anxious room in Sydney’s federal court building, as a judge quietly explained that the man once revered as the most famous soldier of his generation was, on the balance of probabilities, a murderer who callously killed unarmed civilians while serving in Australia’s military in Afghanistan.

As the judgment came down, the Victoria Cross winner was far away on the Indonesian resort island of Bali.

Roberts-Smith had sued three Australian newspapers – the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Canberra Times – for defamation, alleging stories they published in 2018 had falsely portrayed him as a murderer and a war criminal, a man “who broke the moral and legal rules of military engagement” and “disgraced” his country and its military. The newspapers defended their reporting as true.

Last Thursday, Roberts-Smith lost resoundingly. His case was uniformly dismissed. And with that will probably come a legal bill somewhere in the order of A$35m ($23m).

Almost defiantly, Roberts-Smith had attended every day of this trial that he brought to court, demanding his once-glittering reputation be restored. But on this day of reckoning all that was seen of him was a newspaper picture of him relaxing on that island resort. He was not in the building, not in the country, to hear the result.