A judge has ruled that mining billionaire Gina Rinehart can view the second episode of Channel Nine’s The House of Hancock before it airs.
Rinehart’s lawyers successfully applied to the supreme court to be given a copy of the concluding episode of the series before its scheduled airing on Sunday night.
Australia’s richest woman is seeking to determine whether the drama is defamatory in its portrayal of her fraught relationship with her late father, Lang Hancock, and his wife Rose, a former housemaid Rinehart employed to care for her father after her mother died.
Justice Peter Garling said that based on promotional material and interviews about the second episode there was a real prospect the show would air statements that are not entirely accurate and perhaps even made up.
He ordered Nine Network to hand over a DVD of the episode due to be broadcast on Sunday. It could only be viewed by Rinehart, her senior and junior counsel and a number of solicitors.
“I am satisfied the plaintiff is entitled to see it,” he said.
He said Rinehart’s lawyers had to let the Nine Network know if they were going to make an application to stop the broadcast of the show by 9.15pm on Friday. If such an application was made the hearing would happen at midday on Saturday, he said.
Rinehart’s lawyers have argued that the actors may be engaging in false and misleading conduct by portraying events that never happened.
At the supreme court hearing in Sydney on Friday, Garling called that argument “novel” and said if applied it “could shut down all of Shakespeare’s plays”, the Australian reported.
Rinehart’s barrister Tom Blackburn SC also used a story on Nine’s A Current Affair program on Thursday night to argue that much of the action in the drama is simply made up.
A Current Affair interviewed the program’s producer, Michael Cordell, and asked him: “Did you make this stuff up?”
“We’re making a drama, we’re not making a documentary,” Cordell replied.
The entertainment reporter Peter Ford was also interviewed about The House of Hancock and described it as a “ripping yarn” straight out of the US television tradition. “This is a big explosive Dallas-type drama and a lot of it we didn’t have to make up, a lot of it is on the public record,” Ford told ACA.
Rinehart’s lawyers have seized on the ACA segment as evidence much of the action in the drama is fiction. “These exchanges are a clear admission not only that the miniseries contains matters that are untrue, but that your client knew that they were untrue when it broadcast the program,” Rinehart’s legal team wrote to Nine.
“Mr Ford is further quoted as saying via other media after viewing the show that the second show contains ‘an even more explosive conclusion this Sunday’, and adds that it is ‘must-see television on Sunday night, except for Mrs Rinehart, she should definitely make plans to go out to dinner next Sunday night.”
“Given your client’s admissions that the programs contain untruths, and Peter Ford’s boast after seeing the film on A Current Affair that the second program is ‘even more explosive’, and that our client should ‘make plans to go out to dinner’, we have reason to think that the second program may be defamatory of our client, contain injurious falsehoods about her, and involve your client in an accessorial breach [of] Australian consumer law.”
The legal letter also includes quotes from Ford who has seen both parts of the series. “They make her look like an obsessed, vindictive shrew,” Ford says. “I felt very sorry for her. I actually – I don’t know the woman at all, I’ve never met her – but I can’t believe that somebody could truly be that sour about life, but that’s the picture they have painted of her.
“There’s a very final scene in The House of Hancock, if you stick around to watch it, I reckon your jaw will drop.”
The series is a dramatisation of the wealthy family’s life. On the Nine website there are numerous links to archival material which viewers can access to compare the drama to the real events as described on TV news.
The second episode covers the legal battle between Rinehart and Rose Hancock over Lang Hancock’s estate, as well as the dramatic scenes when he died. It also covers more recent events when Rinehart’s children took her to court over their inheritance.
After the first part screened on Sunday night the executive director of Hancock Prospecting, Tad Watroba, issued a list of alleged errors in the program, including that Hancock had insulted his daughter over her weight.
“Mr Hancock never told Mrs Rinehart that no one could ever love her, or that her husband never loved her,” Watroba said. “The scene was made up and untrue. Her relationship with Mr Frank Rinehart was very loving, and her mother Hope loved her son-in-law also.”
Beginning on the first night of TV ratings for 2015 to an audience of 1.4 million, the two-part drama has been described by Nine as “the controversial and epic true story of the Hancock dynasty”.
