The Sydney Morning Herald’s response to Paul Sheehan’s inflammatory column about Muslim males brutally raping and bashing an off-duty nurse – which quickly proved to be palpably false – has been to remain silent.



Sheehan, who has a history of denigrating the Muslim community in Australia, was allowed to pen a mea culpa for Thursday’s paper and to amend his original column which was so graphic in its details of an anal, oral and vaginal rape by Arabic-speaking men that it brought many readers to tears.

The Herald was so proud of the original well-read column, which ran off the front page on Monday and on the Age and Brisbane Times websites, they published several letters in the paper the next day which deplored the lack of action by NSW police.

“Paul Sheehan’s article was so disturbing I wish I had not read it,” wrote Marie Del Monte on the Herald’s letters page. “Louise’s ordeal was and remains truly sickening. But equally unbelievable and sickening was the lack of police response.”

It was unbelievable because it wasn’t true. As soon as the piece was published on Monday, the police, who had never been contacted by Sheehan, asked him to encourage Louise to speak to them. She refused. A video of a woman telling a similar story peppered with racism at a Reclaim Australia rally has recently surfaced and has been widely reported to be Sheehan’s source. Guardian Australia has not been able to independently verify this.

The whole story began to unravel.

But five days later, the editors have not taken the offending column down. They have not apologised to readers, to victims of sexual assault or to the Muslim community despite the original column claiming there were gangs of rapists called Mercs or “Middle Eastern raping cunts” who roamed the streets and “pulled prostitutes into the car” to rape them.

Sheehan, who gave a sole interview to News Corporation in which he blamed a “good source” for putting him in touch with a woman who wanted justice, has not been sacked.

Sheehan told the Australian on Friday that it was not the editors’ fault as they had asked him if he was sure of his facts. He took the blame, in an apparent attempt to clear the Sydney Morning Herald editors from the appearance of negligence.

“The editors asked me what details of her story I had been able to check and I told them I had been given the names of police officers, which I had checked, and she had quoted from diary entries, and other materials,” Sheehan told the Australian.

Earlier, he admitted that “prior to writing the column I had Googled her name” but not seen any red flags.

Seasoned journalists are asking how a simple Google search can be considered adequate research when a story blackened the name of an entire community and justice system.

Many Herald journalists are furious that he has damaged the reputation of the masthead and say that Sheehan has been given special treatment.

Newsroom sources told Guardian Australia Sheehan’s opinion editor did repeatedly question him about the piece but in his “usual style he just brushed her off and told her he knew what he was doing”. Sheehan, a strong character in his mid-60s, is not a man who takes instruction from relatively junior editors.

All that seems to have emerged from a series of crisis meetings yesterday in which editor-in-chief Darren Goodsir and managing editor Stuart Washington discussed the fallout is more damage control.

As well as Sheehan’s interview in the Australian, on Friday the Herald published a strong piece by academic Randa Abdel-Fattah in which she calls out the “racialised discourse” that stigmatises Muslim men as criminals. “According to Sheehan … sexual assault is foreclosed as a Muslim/Middle Eastern crime,” she says.

At a time when Fairfax is struggling to hold onto its reputation as a quality publication and a trusted source of news, management has inexplicably decided not to comment.

It is even more surprising in the light of what they did to another veteran columnist Mike Carlton who swore in response to readers who attacked him for a column about Gaza. Fairfax executive Sean Aylmer overruled Goodsir’s apology on the website and suspended Carlton for six weeks as punishment. Carlton, a popular columnist to the left of Sheehan, resigned in protest.

Sheehan has been dogged by controversy for years, mainly because of his preoccupation with linking Muslim men and rape and railing against multiculturalism, which he did in his first book Among the Barbarians.

But his biggest scandal involved something far less sinister: magic water.

Ten years ago, the highly-paid Fairfax columnist wrote a laudatory feature about what he called “magic water”, claiming it had medicinal properties. He wrote:

As for me, after being on the water since February 2000, I am taking no drugs of any kind, suffer no back or neck pain except after a long day at the computer, do not have lupus symptoms, do not collapse in the afternoons, and it does not hurt to move half the parts of my body. For someone with a cocktail of chronic conditions, I feel suspiciously normal and relatively pain-free.

When its creator went missing before doing a clinical trial and a Herald colleague began working on an expose of the fraud, Sheehan clung to his belief: “for the record, I still drink Unique Water daily”.

But before the magic water expose was published, Herald editors once again gave Sheehan the benefit of the doubt. They gave him the latitude to publish his own story – a spoiler of sorts – which raised doubts about magic water and laid the blame elsewhere.

“After a flood of publicity, Unique Water’s creator has gone silent – and missing, writes Paul Sheehan.”

A year after the magic water debacle, in a new book about four teenage girls who were horribly assaulted by Pakistani brothers – Girls Like You – Sheehan linked the Cronulla riots to multiple rape cases asking “how many other cultural time bombs were ticking amid the Muslim male population living within the liberality of Australia”.

In a review of Girls Like You published in his own paper, the reviewer said Sheehan “seems to imply that Muslim men are more prone to violence, sexual or otherwise”.

Ten years on and the Herald is still giving Sheehan space to perpetrate the damaging myth.