EXCLUSIVE Lisa Wilkinson launches astonishing public attack on 'three women' at Network Ten - as she reveals her surprise next career move
Lisa Wilkinson has sharply criticised Network Ten during a public question and answer session - with the TV star pointing the finger at 'three women' at the network who she claims share the blame for her catastrophic Logies speech.
During a talk at a book festival in Taree, on the NSW mid-north-coast, on Friday night, the one-time co-host of The Project unleashed a fiery blast at her former bosses at Network Ten.
Addressing a dimly lit, half-full auditorium for $25-a-head, Wilkinson was asked by one attendee why women fail to support other women in media, leading the veteran TV and magazine journalist to reply: 'I would love to know'.
She then went on to slam a trio of unnamed women who 'run Channel Ten ' for allegedly failing to accept their share of the blame for her controversial 2022 Gold Logie victory speech.
That speech, where she praised Brittany Higgins ' courage, led to the delay of the trial of Bruce Lehrman n for allegedly raping Ms Higgins at Parliament House - leading Wilkinson to be widely pilloried.
'Three women who run Channel Ten all read that speech,' Wilkinson said.
'When s*** hit the fan I said: "I'm on the front page of every newspaper in the country right now, I am being destroyed.
'I will take some of the blame because I said those words, but they are the words you asked me to say.
'You (the Ten women) know the legal position I am in. You approved it. I went to the legal department .... three times, including up to the afternoon of the Logies before I got on that stage.
'You've got to take some of the blame.
'I was told: "Oh we couldn't do that. That will only make it worse".
'And as the weeks went on and I said: "This is getting worse, not for you, no-one's mentioned the role that any of you have played".
'And it was three women.'
Wilkinson did not refer to the three women she was speaking about by name.
However, in an affidavit to the Federal Court for Lehrmann's defamation trial against Ten, Wilkinson said she believed Ten's senior legal counsel Tasha Smithies, head of PR Cat Donovan and CEO Beverley McGarvey had 'reviewed and approved' her speech. Only Ms McGarvey is employed in a major executive role running Ten.
The extraordinary public blast is the first time outside court proceedings that Wilkinson has been critical of her former employer, which paid her $1.7million a year to co-host The Project - only for her to disappear off air on gardening leave for the final two years of her contract.
Lisa Wilkinson reveals her next job
Wilkinson started off her 'Evening With Lisa Wilkinson' event with a joke about the Logies saga.
'Before I begin, before anybody starts feeling a bit nervous, I have to confirm that I have had this speech legalled by my independent legal team, so don't anybody panic, least of all me,' she said.
She then trotted out her familiar working-class-girl-from-Sydney's-west-makes-good story, portrayed her downfall from network television as hardship suffered with dignity.
Asked by an audience member why she had not yet taken up a post at a public broadcaster - such as the ABC or SBS - Wilkinson answered that she was still in a form of legal limbo, despite Ten and her triumph over Lehrmann in their defamation case.
'I'm in a very interesting position at the moment. That's the most generic word I can come up with for the position I'm in,' she said.
'I don't know if you're aware that even though we've won the legal case - and the judge did declare that Bruce Lehrmann is a rapist - Bruce Lehrmann has appealed that finding.
'And so the case, the appeal, is back in court in August ... I don't know what's going to happen.'
She swatted down rumours of a foray into politics, claiming her time was instead being taken up by penning a biography on a woman whose life she sees as the 'greatest Australian story that has never been told'.
Wilkinson said the unnamed woman's story crossed her desk at her darkest hour in recent memory - the weekend after Channel Seven's Spotlight aired a tape of a pre-interview she had with Ms Higgins before she appeared on The Project.
Channel Seven's 'disgusting' edit
Wilkinson was clearly still upset by the network's portrayal of a five-hour meeting she had with Higgins and her now-husband David Sharaz.
'They completely twisted what was said, edited it in a way that was disgusting, that made it look like we were in a nightclub,' she claimed.
'It was all caught on tape because we were ordered by the courts to give them everything we had.
'And I'm an honest journalist. I'm not going to hide anything, you know, I want the truth to come out, but what Channel Seven did with it blew my mind, and for me, I couldn't see a way forward.'
The mum-of-three, who lives in Cremorne on Sydney's lower north shore, said she was unable to leave her palatial home for two weeks after the story aired.
Wilkinson said things got so bad her husband, Peter FitzSimons cancelled a work trip to be by her side.
'He was really worried about me, and he had good reason to be very worried about me,' she told the audience.
While she remained tight-lipped on her upcoming biography, the parallels with her efforts to bring Higgins' story out of the darkness were plain to see.
'When Australia learns about this woman and realises that her story has been buried, you're all going to fall in love with her,' she said.
After a life spent within the media looking out, the light has been turned back on her. Or as she put it: 'I've found myself in the unfortunate position of going from reporting the news to actually becoming the news.'
It's led her to disdain the industry that made her and broke her.
'When you're at the bottom of a pile and you know the truth, and you know that there are journalists who do know the truth, will either stay silent or invent a narrative, because I was silenced legally, there's a lot of mainstream media I'm quite disgusted by,' she said.
And yet, she still believes in its power to achieve positive change.
'Despite all that I have witnessed in recent times and all that I have been through, I do believe that it has all been worth it, because sunlight really is the best disinfectant, and that the only thing more frightening than speaking your truth is not speaking at all,' she said.
'And as personally, financially and professionally hard as the last few years have been for me, I will never regret putting the Brittany Higgins story to air.
'It has changed our country.
'It has exposed truths that desperately needed to be exposed, and as the toxic culture wars, the cheap headlines and the uninformed commentators have begun to fall away, I know the legacy that this story is continuing to deliver for so many women and survivors of sexual assault around this country, and I'm so proud to have been a part of that.
'That is what matters in my story.'
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The Sun
35 minutes ago
- The Sun
My mum abandoned me and gave me to a cult – we were fed LSD, beaten, bleached & waterboarded to keep us under control
BEN Shenton was just 18 months old when his mother gave him up to a well-spoken blonde woman who swore she'd give him the best life possible. Little did she know her decision would put Ben through years of abuse at the hands of a woman who believed she was Jesus Christ reborn. 9 9 9 Images of Ben show a happy young boy, but the reality was entirely different - as the youngster was forced to become part of a notorious cult known as 'The Family'. Anne Hamilton-Byrne, who Ben would grow up to know as his mother, became the leader of the cult based in Australia, which drugged and beat him. He had no idea of his life before Anne, as she went to great lengths to keep his adoption a secret, even bleaching his hair platinum blond like hers and his new 'siblings'. Despite abusing more than 20 children, including Ben, Anne and her husband and cult co-leader, Bill Hamilton-Byrne, never faced justice. Now, over four decades on from the abuse, Ben shares his story of growing up in the "Kai Lama" compound, where children were locked in with barbed wire and tortured. FIRST IMPRESSIONS Anne first started out as a yoga teacher before turning to a more 'spiritual life' and eventually believing she was Jesus Christ reincarnated. She was born with the name Evelyn and had three marriages in total - the first coming to an end when her husband died in a car crash, which led to her 'spiritual awakening.' She met English physicist Dr Raynor Johnson in 1963 and the following year, they set up a group dedicated to spreading a surreal combination of Christianity and Hinduism, with Hamilton-Byrne at its centre. Her final husband, Bill, became the person who led the doomsday cult with her in the 1960s, when the world faced existential threats like nuclear warfare, the Vietnam War and the spread of communism. Anne was able to rope people into the cult through yoga lessons, meetings at her house once a week, and then three times a week, until she built the compound on land near her house for them to move into. Inside a 'mind-controlling' CULT which 'forced mum and daughter to hit each other' and chose Fiji as the 'promised land' Anne came across as beautiful, well-spoken and nurturing, so it's no surprise Ben's mum was easily convinced he'd have a better life with her. Ben said Anne manipulated his mother into giving him up in 1970, convincing her that 'only she could give me the best life possible'. The pair consistently preyed on vulnerable people like Ben's mum, Joy, who had suffered a back injury and felt she could not look after him anymore. They also started recruiting people into their cult by approaching patients from Newhaven Hospital in Kew, a private psychiatric facility run and operated by various members of The Family, who targeted vulnerable patients, subjecting them to heavy doses of LSD and electroshock therapy. She and husband Hamilton-Byrne took children through illegal adoptions, allowing the cult to grow in numbers before imprisoning them in a strict home-schooling environment at a rural property near Eildon in Victoria. 9 Using lawyers, social workers, and doctors to forgo official channels, they were able to forge birth documents and raise over a dozen children to believe they were the birth children of the Hamilton-Byrnes. When children were born inside the compound to cult members, they were raised to believe their birth mothers were instead among a handful of 'aunts', who gave out brutal punishments for whatever they saw fit. PICTURE PERFECT FAMILY From the outside, the family looked picture-perfect as they lived on their compound in Victoria, Australia. Life at Kai Lama seemed healthy and even advanced for its years; it featured yoga, exercise, vegetarian meals, meditation and education. Ben lived on the remote property and was raised alongside dozens of other children for 13 years and recalls living with 28 other kids at one point. "Growing up, it was Anne and Bill, they were mum and dad; and then there were foster kids, and they were kids of other sect members, who would either come up on weekends or stay there for stints of a couple of years," Ben, told the BBC. "The greatest amount of kids at any given stage was 28," he added. Anne and Bill brought up the children as their own, even dressing them in matching outfits and dying their hair bleach blond to appear like a real family. I loved them in their little smocks and jeans and the long hair and ribbons. Anne Hamilton-Byrne cult leader "We were her children. We were different ages. We'd line up von Trapp style (like) The Sound of Music, which we'd watch, dressed in outfits that matched and that was just what we were asked to do," he told the True Crimes Conversation podcast. "You look back on that and you see it's choreographed. "It crafted a belief that she had these children, which she didn't. We were all either adopted or handed over." In an interview years after the children were finally taken from her, Anne said: 'I wanted them to look like brothers and sisters - I must admit this. 'I loved them in their little smocks and jeans and the long hair and ribbons. It was beautiful - it was lovely to see.' Asked why she imprisoned 28 children over two decades, she responded: 'I love children.' 9 9 UNDER WRAPS But in reality, the children were subjected to years of beatings, mind games, isolation, and forced to take drugs by the cult leader, who had convinced more than 500 people she was Jesus Christ. The couple had convinced their followers they were making a 'master race' while teaching a mixture of Christianity and Hinduism. Ben recalls one form of torture Anne liked to perform on the children was waterboarding. It's a method of torture that creates such horrific psychological pain that its use has even been banned in the US military. "We were all lined up. We were belted. Our head held under the bucket of water, interrogated," he said. "Held there until you thought you were suffocating, brought back out again. "Horrendous experience. It caused nightmares. "These things shape your personality." Ben recalls seeing his siblings being beaten with a belt, and says they were given LSD 'as part of an initiation ritual.' 'I was watching her being belted with a buckle and she's being beaten to the point where she's wriggling out of her clothes,' he said of his sister, Sarah. 'Hearing her body smash across the balustrades - it was horrendous to know they had the power to do that and would do it,' he told the MailOnline. She had this ability to be able to be so warm, so loving, so caring, and yet at the same time so manipulative. Ben Shenton Ben says Anne's most effective tactic was to keep the children from forming bonds with each other to keep them all in line. To weed out misdeeds in the children, Anne would perform group interrogations by beating them until someone came clean. Ben said he stayed compliant to avoid punishment. "This was the evil genius of her. She understood that if she could separate us, isolate us, make it so that we couldn't build relationships with one another and punish us, then she could control us," he said. "Anyone who's lived under domestic violence will know the living with fear, the walking on eggshells, the currying favour of those in authority, or the absolute rejection of them, the hatred of them, the love-hate relationship. "It's domestic abuse on steroids," he said. Now, Ben believes Anne was a sociopath or psychopath. "She had this ability to be able to be so warm, so loving, so caring, and yet at the same time so manipulative," he said. 'The Family' Cult Timeline 1968 The Family begins to 'adopt' and acquire children to create a 'master race'. 1974 An official school is set up for the 'master race' children at the Lake Eildon property. 1978 Anne Hamilton marries William (Bill) Byrne and they take the surname Hamilton-Byrne. 1983 Police visit the Lake Eildon property to search for a missing girl. She is not found on the property. 1987 (14 August) Combined police raid on sect property at Lake Eildon. Anne is overseas. Bill is present at the raid but is not charged. The children are removed from the sect and placed into care. 1987 (Oct/Nov) Bill flees to Hawaii to meet Anne. 1987 (12 December) Detective Lex de Man is called to investigate. He learns about The Family. 1989 (about June) Lex de Man writes a report recommending Victoria Police commence a criminal investigation into The Family. 1989 (11 December) Operation Forest Task Force commences. 1993 (4 June) Anne and Bill are arrested in the Catskill Mountains, Upstate New York. 1993 (17 August) Anne and Bill are extradited to Australia. 1993 (31 August) Anne and Bill appear in the Victorian Magistrates' Court, charged with conspiracy to defraud and commit perjury by falsely registering the births of triplets. 1994 In the County Court, Anne and Bill avoid prison and are fined $5000 each. 2001 Bill dies, leaving Anne to lead a diminishing group of followers. 2019 At 97, Anne lives in the dementia wing of a suburban Melbourne nursing home. CAUGHT IN THE ACT It wasn't until 1987 that the cult was finally searched by 100 police officers and the children were rescued. At the time, a 15-year-old Ben was doing his scheduled yoga class when police stormed in. His sister, Sarah Moore, had managed to escape the cult at 17 and headed straight to the police to tell them what was going on. Not taking any chances, police stormed the property and rescued six children, including Ben. While he was reluctant to go with them at first, he soon realised this was his path to freedom. He recalls: 'I think I got this epiphanal moment, realising this is the ticket out of here. So I just I let go, and I went with them." It was only then that Ben found out he was not their biological son and was handed over by his mother Joy, who stayed in the cult as an 'aunt'. At the time, Anne was in Hawaii while Bill stayed on the compound, but he wasn't arrested. Later, he went to New York to meet Anne before the pair were arrested and extradited back to Australia. While many of the children came forward with claims of abuse, both Anne and Bill were only charged with conspiracy to defraud and perjury by falsely registering the birth of triplets. The pair were spared jail and fined just £2,300 each for the crime. Detective Lex de Man, who investigated the case, says evidence of abuse was unable to be taken to court despite multiple victims coming forward. Detective de Man recently told The Age: 'My only regret is she was never held totally to account for the misery she caused to the former cult children. 'I have no sympathy for the woman I consider the most evil person I ever met in my police career.' LIFE NOW Ben moved into foster care when he left the cult, and while lying on his bunk bed with fresh pyjamas and a meal in his tummy, he realised he'd never go back to The Family again "I realised then I (didn't) have to do this anymore, I'm free. I don't need to go back," he said. "That, to me, was when I shut the door." Four decades on, Ben is a proud husband to Rajes and a dad to Ellie and Callum, who live in Perth, Australia. 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Daily Mail
43 minutes ago
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Daily Mail
43 minutes ago
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