A well-known defamation lawyer from Sydney, Sue Chrysanthou will represent in court a man falsely accused of stabbing and murdering six people in the recent Bondi Junction attack.
MSN.com reported that the man, Benjamin Cohen, who is a university student in Sydney, was incorrectly named by Channel 7 News as the perpetrator, and is now filling a defamation suit against them.
Mr Cohen’s solicitor, defamation lawyer Patrick George from Giles George law firm, will also help his court case.
“We have issued the concerns notice to Channel 7,” Mr George told ABC News.
An ABC investigation found the wrong identification initially occurred online on Saturday afternoon. It was amplified by a number of accounts on X in the hours that followed the attack over the weekend.
By the Sunday morning, at 6:15am, Channel 7 News named Mr Cohen as the “40-year-old lone wolf attacker.”
A spokesperson from Channel 7 told the ABC that the “mistake was human error and it has been rectified” and that “Seven sincerely apologises for the error.”
Mr Cohen told the ABC it was “extremely disappointing to see thousands of people mindlessly propagating misinformation without even the slightest thought put to fact-checking or real-life consequences.”
NSW Police later officially confirmed the identity of the attacker as 40-year-old Joel Cauchi, who was fatally shot by an officer inside Bondi Junction Westfield after the attacks.
Channel 7 News now has 28 days to respond to the defamation claim made against them.
Source: MSN.com.
