Off the wire
• S. Korean consumer expenditure hits record low in 2014  • News Analysis: Little change for U.S. strategy to fight IS  • Urgent: 3 killed, 15 injured in train derailment in southern India  • China plans tourism zone with Russia, DPRK  • Court upholds fraud sentence for former BOC banker  • Chinese FM: China-Pakistan brotherhood will never go rusty  • U.S. oil producer slashes budget by nearly 60 pct on oil crunch  • Liu Cigui elected governor of China's Hainan  • Australian Labor poised for victory in Queensland election  • Feature: A Chinese judge's life-or-death struggle  
You are here: 　 Home

1st LD: Australia's richest person attempts to block TV show

Xinhua, February 13, 2015 Adjust font size:

Australia's richest person Gina Rinehart launched a legal action on Friday to try to stop the second part of a television program about her family's colorful life story from airing.

Following Australian broadcaster Channel 9's screening of the first part of "House of Hancock," Rinehart's legal team were unhappy with the "fictitious, unfounded or grossly distorted" scenes portrayed in the show that is based on Rinehart's relationship with her late father, Lang Hancock.

Rinehart's lawyers applied to the Supreme Court to be given a copy of the concluding episode of the two-part program due to be aired on Sunday night.

Rinehart, Australia's wealthiest person and the sixth richest woman in the world, is seeking to determine whether the drama is defamatory in its portrayal of her relationship with her late father and his wife Rose, a former housemaid Rinehart employed to care for her father after her mother died.

Rinehart's lawyer Tom Blackburn told the court on Friday that one of the show's producers had admitted in an interview that some of the scenes had been made up, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported.

"It is apparent Channel Nine knows some of it is made up," Blackburn said.

Peter Ford, an entertainment reporter who has seen an advance copy of the "House of Hancock," described it as a "ripping yarn" straight out of the U.S. television tradition.

"They make her look like an obsessed, vindictive shrew," Ford told the A Current Affair program on Channel 9. "I felt very sorry for her. I actually I don't know the woman at all, I've never met her but I can't believe that somebody could truly be that sour about life, but that's the picture they have painted of her."

Lawyer Blackburn asked the court to allow an application for urgent preliminary discovery against Nine Entertainment Co.

He said Rinehart wanted to see the footage to be sure there were no grounds for an "urgent injunction" that would stop the show going to air on Sunday night.

"(It) gave my client cause for enormous concern about the likely ... honesty of that program," he said. Endi