Steve Fishman from New York magazine contacted me some time ago to seek my assistance on a story he was writing on the Murdoch family. The main thing he wanted was a copy of my article on Anna, published in the August 2001 edition of the Australian Women’s Weekly, and a transcript of the interview. I sent him a copy of the article and told him I would think about his second request, ie for a copy of the interview. I wanted to check with Anna first.

I contacted Anna by email and told her of the request from New York, but never heard back, at which point I decided to help Fishman. I did so for a few reasons, firstly that I owned the copyright on the story and, therefore, the taped interview; secondly that Anna never resiled – at the time or subsequently – from anything she’d said to me during that interview; and thirdly, in response to an inquiry from me at the time – Anna said she had no problem with my story being on-sold to another publication.

The fact that Steve Fishman used unpublished parts of the interview should hardly be surprising. My article was about 4000 words in length and based, in large part, on a three hour conversation held in Long Island. As with any such interview one can never hope to include everything an interviewee says. One picks the eyes out of it, as I believe I did. It would be natural, though, for Fishman to look for bits in the interview that hadn’t been published because it would makes his own story look fresher, more revelatory. Which it does.

Having said that, there is one conspicuous error in Fishman’s story as it relates to my own article. Fishman writes that Rupert told Anna when she was forced to resign from News Corp: “[You’re] an embarrassment to everyone else on the board.’ This is not what Rupert said to her, nor what Anna told me. What she said was that when Rupert told her to “get off the (News Corp) Board,” she felt (from her own perspective, not Rupert’s) (that) … `there’s no point being there if you’re of no use and it’s embarrassing to everyone else on the board.”