NSW: Man who sued over scallop fall is back in court

AAP General News (Australia)
02-15-2007
NSW: Man who sued over scallop fall is back in court

SYDNEY, Feb 15 AAP - A Sydney man who sued a shopping centre after slipping on a potato
scallop is back in court, this time claiming newspaper reports on his case were defamatory.

Richard Sheehan is suing Nationwide News, publisher of The Daily Telegraph, over two
articles printed in August 2004.

The reports were about a civil case Mr Sheehan was embroiled in after he slipped on
a greasy scallop at Winston Hills Mall in June 1998.

Mr Sheehan was seeking $750,000 but the parties reached a confidential out of court settlement.

Back in the NSW Supreme Court today, Mr Sheehan, from Baulkham Hills in Sydney's north-west,
sat quietly in his wheelchair reading over the two articles.

Acting for Mr Sheehan, Kieran Smark told the court the articles, which describe Mr
Sheehan as a serial litigant, carried the imputation he acted dishonestly.

He said one article, published on August 11, 2004, under the headline "This man wants
$750,000 for slipping on a scallop, Does he deserve it?" sought to ridicule Mr Sheehan.

The article was accompanied by a series of photographs the newspaper said showed Mr
Sheehan sitting in his "whiz-bang" wheelchair and then squatting to lift the wheelchair
up.

The structure of the article "repeatedly raises what Mr Sheehan says only to savage
and ridicule it," Mr Smark said.

"His claim is stated and then it is held up to ridicule and that is the way the ordinary
reader would understand it," he told the four-person jury today.

The hearing, before Justice Virginia Bell continues.

AAP lma/klw/it/cdh

KEYWORD: SHEEHAN

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