Journalists at the centre of the biggest story in 60 Minutes history have reflected on what went wrong, why it went wrong and the circus that followed.
In April, 2016, crew members from the Australian current affairs program were detained in Beirut, Lebanon during the filming of a botched child recovery operation.
Veteran journalist Tara Brown, producer Steven Rice, cameraman Ben Williamson and sound recordist David Ballment were arrested while attempting to help Australian woman Sally Faulker recover her children from the care of Ms Faulkner’s estranged former partner, Ali Elamine.
In a special edition of the Channel 9 program marking 40 years of 60 Minutes, to air this Sunday, Brown and several of her colleagues share some startling admissions.
Among the confessions from Brown is that she still has not read the newspaper coverage that followed her arrest, including a front-page story headlined “Tara’s Torment”.
“The ambition is never to be the story,” she tells the program.
“I still haven’t seen those front pages. There is a great sense of sorrow when you realise what a splash you’ve made, for all the wrong reasons.”
Reporter Charles Wooley ponders whether the team did the right thing in not simply following the story, but becoming the story.
“Should we have done it? In retrospect, you wouldn’t have wanted to because everybody went through such a torrid time.”
Journalist Alison Langdon called it “the worst day of my career as a journalist”. She told the program that news of her colleagues being arrested and detained in a foreign prison “shocked us all because it could’ve been any of us”.
But not everybody on the 60 Minutes team is remorseful. Ray Martin, who once drove a getaway car during a child recovery operation in Spain in the 1980s, jumped to his colleagues’ defence.
Martin said the media had no right to treat the Nine crew the way they did.
“The idea of journalists turning on journalists over a legitimate story appalled me,” Martin said.
“I think the newspaper coverage was cheap and nasty and I think we should’ve been all working as journalists to get them out of there.”
Martin previously spoke about the decision he and his team made decades earlier. He said the situations were remarkably similar.
“Ethically, as a journalist, I thought we were doing the right thing, because the courts had judged the case and decided that the mother had custody of the children, and the father had broken Australian laws and taken the children away,” Martin said.
“We certainly didn’t pay any money to them … That’s one of the areas I wouldn’t comment on,” he said, adding: “I know the crew are highly ethical, and I can’t believe they would do something that’s unethical.”
Brown and her crew were facing charges including kidnapping, physical assault, hiding information and criminal conspiracy. They escaped all charges.
They were detained on April 7 along with Ms Faulkner and members of a child abduction team over a kidnapping attempt involving Ms Faulkner’s two children.
The children were living in Lebanon with their father, Ali Elamine, when agents from Child Abduction Recovery International, including founder Adam Whittington, attempted a daylight abduction that went horribly wrong.
The Beirut judge who ruled on the case accepted the Nine Network financed and directed the kidnapping operation, something Nine’s own review also acknowledged despite the company’s early insistence it paid Whittington by mistake.
Brown and producer Rebecca Le Tourneau won a Walkley Award for journalism in 2015 for Brown’s take-down of paedophile Peter Scully in a story titled “Catching A Monster”.
In her interview for 60 Minutes’ 40th year special, she said the greatest tragedy about what happened in Beirut wasn’t her arrest, or the arrest of her colleagues.
“There is definitely still a story to be told in Beirut, and you still want to tell it, despite what happened and despite various judgments around it. The core of what that was about is yet to be told and it’s a story that happens over an over again, potentially every week, in Australia.”
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