Ben Roberts-Smith launched a multimedia blitz on Thursday to go with his new clothing label, denying five charges of the war crime of murder ahead of his criminal trial and insisting he would not change a thing from his military career.
In a chummy 2½-hour interview with Sydney radio jock Ben Fordham, and a simultaneous 6000-word news.com.au story billed “Exclusive”, Roberts-Smith denied murdering five Afghan detainees between 2009 and 2012. Each killing had been a legitimate engagement involving split-second decisions conducted in the fog of war, he claimed.
A judge in a long-running defamation case that involved multiple SAS witnesses found to the civil standard in 2023 that Roberts-Smith had committed four murders – of one civilian and three combatants who were “under control” and posing no threat.
The civil case judge, Anthony Besanko, found that Roberts-Smith had kicked the civilian off a cliff, smashing his face on a rock, then ordered another soldier to shoot him dead. Besanko also found that three other Afghans had been out of action, under control and posing no threat when Roberts-Smith either killed them or ordered others to do so.
Bullying complaints were also found proved against him. Roberts-Smith answered this in the interview with Fordham by revealing his nickname in the military had been “Front Dagger”.
“I don’t stab people in the back. I just give it to them straight in the chest,” he said.
The media interviews come as Roberts-Smith launches a new clothing brand, Epic 1 Two, named after one of his military call-signs. The former soldier wore a branded T-shirt on the YouTube feed that aired the full Fordham interview.
Roberts-Smith has said the label, which he launched with the social media tagline “Stay comfortable in the chaos”, will fund his family during his legal battles.
He revealed to Fordham that Seven Network media tycoon Kerry Stokes had spent “upwards of $30 million” on the losing defamation case, which Roberts-Smith brought against The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Canberra Times.
Stokes had funded him because “he believed in me”, the former soldier said.
“He’s never taken a position about, you know, innocence or guilt. It’s just, you deserve to go through the process fairly.”
Roberts-Smith’s criminal charges have since become a cause celebre for conservatives in Australia. One Nation leader Pauline Hanson and mining billionaire Gina Rinehart, a Hanson sponsor, have argued he has been falsely accused and called his detractors, including WA Liberal MP Andrew Hastie, “traitors”.
Apparently seeking to capitalise on this political moment, Roberts-Smith raised the notion of a “fair go” regularly during the interviews as he tried to humanise his image.
“If it was your son, or your husband, or your brother in that position, would you like them to have a fair go?” the former soldier asked Fordham. “Remember that I’m also a father. I’m a son. I’m a brother. I’m a partner, and at the base level, I’m a human being who’s just trying to deal with the situation that has been put on them.”
Every caller and every text message broadcast on the radio program was positive.
Roberts-Smith said in the interview with News Corp that he had contemplated suicide after allegations surfaced in this masthead in 2017. Referring to the investigative reporting that revealed the war crimes allegations, he said, “psychologically, that takes a toll”.
“At that point, which probably played out over about three to six months of thinking about that every day, that’s rock bottom,” he said.
What saved him, he said, was “the kids [and] the fact that if I took my own life, they [his detractors] would win. They would be able to say I did it because I was guilty, and my family would have to live with that shame.”
He also complained about his arrest at Sydney Airport on April 7 on a plane from Brisbane in front of his partner, Sarah Matulin, and his children. He said it had been farcical, and “such a deliberate attempt to sensationalise the arrest”.
Roberts-Smith said he had been wrong to stay silent before and during the defamation case because he “trusted the system”. He also complained about the uneven playing field in Australia, with government funding for defence and prosecution cases in criminal trials.
Even though his defence was being funded by the taxpayer, his lawyers were paid for only six hours a day while “they’ll pay the prosecution lawyers 10 hours a day”, he complained to Fordham. “There is no parity, and that’s not what justice is about.”
“This time I want a spotlight on the proceedings and more transparency,” he told News Corp.
Roberts-Smith also added his voice to Pauline Hanson’s in a complaint about a 2024 change to Australia’s war crimes legislation. The previous law, passed in 2002, said a person was hors de combat (out of action) in a battlefield if they were under control, and had clearly expressed an intention to surrender or was incapacitated by wounds or sickness, and was abstaining from hostile acts and not attempting to escape.
The 2024 change meant that only one of the three conditions needed to be met to establish a war crime if such a person was harmed. The change was made retrospective.
“So, what you’ve actually done is said you drove down the freeway yesterday, doing 100 kilometres an hour, but today we’ve decided that you’re only allowed to do 80 kilometres an hour on the freeway. So we’re going to charge you for speeding over the limit yesterday,” Roberts-Smith told Fordham.
