http://www.afr.com/brand/rear-windo...roducers--it-just-gets-better-20170305-gurc3s
Seven saga: Board members, bellhops and Sunrise producers - it just gets better!
by
Bryce Corbett
Given that it's a Tuesday, it seems like we're due an
Amber Harrison-
Tim Worner update. The question is: where to begin?
Because it really is that sort of a story: turn your back on it for five minutes and suddenly
there's a Harrison counter-suit in the offing, a bellhop in the mix and in-depth investigative journalism pieces about the affair popping up like so many mushrooms in a field.
So what have we learnt in the last 24 hours or so?
Well, there's the fact that Seven themselves seem to have no compunction inducing a woman at the centre of a high-profile sex saga to break the terms of a confidentiality agreement so that she can tell her side of the story.
Witness
the interview that led Sydney's evening news bulletin on Sunday night. Seven reporter
Peter Fegan sat down with the girl at the centre of the Penrith Panthers'
Bryce "Girl Trouble"
Cartwright abortion pay-off scandal. The same girl who signed a contract to not speak publicly about her ordeal. Because, you know, Seven can see the journalistic merit in getting both sides of the story.
And just to complete the scandalous circle, the young woman, blacked out for the purposes of the interview, is described in the interview as an "occasional employee" of Seven. As indeed she is. On her Twitter account she describes herself as a freelance producer on the breakfast TV show,
Sunrise. Which, as luck would have it, is the show Seven West Media director and Beyond Blue chairman
Jeff Kennett regularly appears on. Doubtless he's preparing a public pronouncement as we speak on how Beyond Blue condemns women being pressured into abortions. Just as he
leapt to the defence of Grant Hackett the other week. Or is it different for sports stars, Jeffrey?
But that's nothing compared to the rumblings that continue to come out of the Seven West Media board, where this week's director-most-likely-to-break-ranks is none other than
David Evans – former chief of Goldman Sachs JBWere's private wealth and institutional equities businesses and one time chair of the Essendon football club.
Evans, who now runs funds management firm Evans & Partners,
famously stepped aside from the chairmanship of the Bombers at the height of the club's drugs scandal.
The SWM board are said to all be standing firm ... for now. But you can bet they will all have carefully watched Monday night's
Four Corners report on
James Packer's China woes – to get a sense of
what it might be like to have the Sarah Ferguson blowtorch turned on them.
Meanwhile, it seems the folk of
Good Weekend are also digging around, preparing their own report into Ambergate.
All of which is good news for no one except Seven's legal reps at Johnson Winter & Slattery, whose counsel
Ruveni Kelleher must surely be now on the brink of some kind of world record for the composition of terse legal letters.
Seriously people. Get in a room and sort it out.
