The man who wasn’t there: Ben Roberts-Smith misses his day of reckoning

Three newspapers proved in their defence to a defamation claim that Ben Roberts-Smith was a ‘criminal’ who ‘broke the moral and legal rules over military engagement’ over an incident at Chenartu in 2012, Justice Anthony Besanko found. Composite: AAP

In the end, the attention was on the man who wasn’t there.

All two metres of Ben Roberts-Smith was glaringly absent from the packed, anxious room in Sydney’s federal court building, as a judge quietly explained that the man once revered as the most famous soldier of his generation was, on the balance of probabilities, a murderer who callously killed unarmed civilians while serving in Australia’s military in Afghanistan.