Antoinette Lattouf v ABC LIVE updates: Broadcaster’s former Sydney content director, head of audio to appear as unlawful termination case continues

Former ABC chair Ita Buttrose appeared in the Federal Court witness box on Tuesday and was grilled about the circumstances in which Lattouf was removed from air.

She was also shown a series of emails she sent to the broadcaster’s managing director David Anderson and chief content officer Chris Oliver-Taylor before and after Lattouf’s exit.

The court heard Buttrose sent ABC managing director David Anderson an email on December 19, 2023, which read: “Has Antoinette been replaced. I am over getting emails about her.”

She denied in court that she was urging him to sack Lattouf.

“I’m asking, ‘What’s going on, has Antoinette been replaced?’” she said. “If I wanted somebody removed, I would be franker than that.”

Oliver-Taylor said in an affidavit filed in court that Anderson forwarded this email to him. Oliver-Taylor said he took from it that “Ms Buttrose wanted Ms Lattouf to cease presenting Sydney Mornings”.

He said this “did not reflect my position at that time, which was that Ms Lattouf’s casual engagement would continue until its scheduled completion” on Friday, December 22, 2023.

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“I did not consider that I was obliged to, or should, change my position to accommodate Ms Buttrose,” Oliver-Taylor said in his affidavit.

Buttrose said in a later email to Anderson: “I have a whole clutch more of complaints . Why can’t she come down with flu? Or Covid. Or a stomach upset? We owe her nothing, we are copping criticism because she wasn’t honest when she was appointed.”

The former ABC chair gave evidence that suggestions of an illness were “just a face-saving idea” to make it “easier” for Lattouf, but that Buttrose herself “didn’t need to save face”.

Oliver-Taylor said in his affidavit that Buttrose sent him six emails in the 19 minutes between 11.13am and 11.32am on December 20, hours before Lattouf was told she would not be required to work the final two shifts of the week. The first had the subject line “More complaints Antoinette 702”.

At 11.25, Buttrose emailed Oliver-Taylor: “I think we will keep getting these complaints until Antoinette leaves.”

Oliver-Taylor said he made the decision that Lattouf should be taken off-air on December 20, three days into her five-day contract, after he was alerted to her Instagram story sharing a report by non-governmental organisation Human Rights Watch about Israel. Lattouf had added the words: “HRW reporting starvation as a tool of war.”

“I formed a view that Ms Lattouf’s conduct had breached the Personal Use of Social Media Guidelines,” he said in his affidavit.