Celebrity cavoodle case ends with $150,000 payout

Wigney said A Current Affair journalist Steve Marshall had made “sarcastic” commentary throughout the broadcasts.

Outside court, Edwards said she was “very, very happy with the outcome”.

“Now we can get back to enjoying the parks and our lives,” she said.

Edwards said it was “never about the money”, and they had tried to settle for $40,000 before trial.

“It destroyed my entire life for the monetisation of some pretty atrocious lies about me,” she said.

“It’s over now, and we won. Justice has been done.”

Edwards said she would be filing a complaint with Nine’s board of directors and the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

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The broadcasts depicted Mark Gillespie, who claimed he owned Oscar, grabbing the dog from a Kirribilli park and saying “I’m just collecting my property, thank you” before moving away quickly as Edwards ran after him shouting. In the footage, Oscar was wearing a white polo shirt.

Edwards told Gillespie “you cannot take him”, and, “Mark, you are going to be arrested, stop it.”

The court previously heard that police were called and Gillespie handed Oscar to Edwards.

During the 2022 trial, Gillespie told the court he bought Oscar in 2016 and introduced the cavoodle to Edwards and her husband Kenneth Flavell. The pooch gained thousands of followers on Instagram and was photographed in a tuxedo for his appearance in Opera Australia’s La Boheme.

In one of the stories, it was claimed that Edwards was dog-sitting Oscar while Gillespie was on a cruise ship, and “torpedoed his world” by saying she would not be giving the dog back.

Edwards, in her evidence, said her depiction on the show had affected every facet of her life.

“It was everywhere. It was awful. It swallowed me up whole,” she told the court.

She said the “trashy television program” had made her look like a “crazy person”, and was “vigilante justice madness” in the middle of a court case.

Civil proceedings regarding the ownership of Oscar were resolved in the NSW Supreme Court in November 2021, after the broadcasts, when consent orders were made declaring Edwards to be Oscar’s owner.

The commercial litigation barrister has worked as an Assistant State Attorney in the United States and on the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and Joe Biden in 2020.

Nine, also the publisher of this masthead, has been contacted for comment.

The case returns to court in May for final orders.