SYDNEY, Australia — The Australian actor Geoffrey Rush won his defamation case on Thursday against the parent company of a newspaper that published articles accusing him of sexual harassment.

The two front-page articles were published in late 2017 by The Daily Telegraph, a tabloid newspaper in Sydney owned by Rupert Murdoch’s Nationwide News. They said that during a Sydney Theater Company production of “King Lear” from November 2015 to January 2016, Mr. Rush acted inappropriately toward an unnamed female co-star later identified as Eryn Jean Norvill.

Speaking to a packed room in Sydney, Justice Michael Wigney of the Federal Court of Australia said that The Telegraph had not proved that the articles were substantially true, as required by Australian defamation law. He awarded 850,000 Australian dollars, or $608,000, in initial damages to Mr. Rush, with damages for the actor’s economic losses to be determined later.

“This is a sad and unfortunate case,” Justice Wigney said at the beginning of the verdict, adding that the accusations should have been “dealt with in a different way and in a different place to the harsh, adversarial world of a defamation proceeding.”