Former Carlton president Luke Sayers claims his wife took documents from his mobile phone before she launched defamation action against him over a lewd photo scandal.
Sayers claims in a defence filed to the Victorian Supreme Court that he has always acted to protect partner Cate and their children from emotional distress and anguish and took the private photograph for medical reasons.
The former PwC chief executive said he provided a statutory declaration to the AFL about how he believed the photo came to be published on X in a bid to protect his reputation.
“He was compelled to respond to the false insinuation that he had published the X post,” Sayers’ lawyers wrote in the document.
A photo of Sayers’ penis was posted on his X account for 13 minutes in January last year, with a female manager at Blues sponsor Bupa tagged.
Sayers says in the court documents he did not operate the X account and had the photo taken down when he learned of it.
He was then subject to an AFL integrity unit investigation for which he provided a statutory declaration outlining how it had occurred.
Sayers claims in the court documents that in March last year, Cate used his passcode and “accessed, viewed, copied and/or downloaded from Luke’s mobile phone a large volume of emails, text messages and photographs which included a confidential and legally privileged draft of the statutory declaration”.
He alleges that the details contained in it were not in the public domain until Cate commenced her case against him.
Cate Sayers claims that her husband defamed her in the document and breached her confidence by saying she was responsible for posting the photograph.
Her statement of claim also alleges that Sayers disclosed information about her private life, including her sexual history and medical information.
Cate Sayers claims she was defamed by the statement because it implied: “Cate suffers from mental illness and has been prescribed medication by her doctors which she periodically refuses to take, such that her denials about posting the explicit photo from Mr Sayers’ X account cannot be trusted.”
“The information was used to present her as unstable, untrustworthy, erratic, mentally disturbed and/or presenting as a live risk to her own safety,” her statement of claim alleged.
But in his defence, Luke Sayers claims that his estranged wife’s allegations that he breached her privacy by disclosing confidential information are “vague, embarrassing and liable to be struck out”.
Sayers also claims that even if the contents of the statutory declaration are defamatory of Cate, they are protected by a qualified privilege defence, because it was made “in the performance of a legal, social, professional or moral duty”.
“Luke published the statutory declaration to protect an interest in response to an attack on his character and conduct; and the contents of the statutory declaration were commensurate with the attack,” he alleged in the documents.
Sayers was cleared of any wrongdoing by the AFL, but later stepped down as Carlton president. His eponymous consulting firm, Sayers Group, was rebranded as Tenet Advisory. He remains an executive director, despite reducing his shareholding to just 1.3 per cent last year.
In the aftermath of Cate Sayers commencing legal action, two of the couple’s four daughters – Bronte and Claudia Sayers – released a statement supporting their father and promising to give evidence in his defence.
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Kishor Napier-Raman is a senior business writer for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Previously he worked as a CBD columnist and reporter in the federal parliamentary press gallery.Connect via X or email.
