Labor frontbencher Terri Butler says a mutual agreement has been made to pay Queensland University of Technology student Calum Thwaites a “modest payment” to settle a defamation case.
Mr Thwaites
filed a defamation action in Brisbane Magistrates Court last month against Ms Butler after she smeared him as a probable racist and perjurer during a Q&A program.
The law student
was cleared of racism in the Federal Circuit Court after Judge Michael Jarrett accepted that he did not write a Facebook post with the word “niggers” in May, 2013.
In a letter of apology posted to Ms Butler’s website, she concedes she “made comments which were capable of being understood as meaning that you had been responsible for that Facebook post, making you a racist bigot and that, when you denied using those words in court proceedings, you were being dishonest or disingenuous”.
Ms Butler says she accepts that Mr Thwaites was not the author of the Facebook post and agrees with his lawyer Anthony Morris QC that the student was a “victim of malicious identify theft or a prank”.
“There should be no suggestion that you were responsible for the Facebook post, or that your denial was anything other than the truth. Equally, there should be no suggestion that you are racist, or bigoted,” she says in the letter.
“I offer you my unreserved apology for enabling those meanings about you to be conveyed, and for the distress and damage to your reputation caused as a consequence.”
Ms Butler, who engaged former employer Maurice Blackburn to represent her, also says she and Mr Thwaites have agreed that “I will make a modest payment to you, along with a contribution for your legal costs to date, and that you will accept these amounts in the spirit in which they were intended”.
The Australian has been told by Ms Butler’s office that she and Mr Thwaites have reached an agreement and litigation will shortly come to an end.
