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Australian actor Damien Richardson has been found guilty of performing a Nazi salute at an event run and attended by white supremacists in Melbourne last year.
But the magistrate agreed with Richardson’s argument that he was mocking The Age newspaper when he performed the now-outlawed gesture, rather than pledging any loyalty to Nazism.
Damien Richardson at an anti-lockdown protest in 2021.Credit: Photograph by Chris Hopkins
Richardson, of Neighbours and Blue Heelers fame, had claimed he’d been stung by this masthead likening him, in his view, to Adolf Hitler in its previous articles, and performed the salute as a satirical “theatrical performance” on September 14, 2024. At the time he was the main speaker at an event at the Urban St restaurant organised by white supremacist Matt Trihey and attended by senior neo-Nazis including Joel Davis and Blair Cottrell.
While magistrate Justin Foster threw out Richardson’s argument that the gesture had been “theatre” rather than speech, he agreed that the former actor had not engaged in the same antisemitic views expressed by others at the event, and had been mocking “The Age or himself” when he made the salute.
However, the gesture resembled a Nazi salute enough that, under the new laws introduced by the Allan government in 2023, Foster found Richardson guilty of the offence. He will be sentenced next month.
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Richardson claimed this newspaper had labelled him a racist in order to silence his extreme far-right views. Foster said he had not examined the articles in question, which were not identified. But the magistrate noted that Richardson had spoken of his pride that his own grandfather had fought the Nazis in WWII, and appeared to shut down some of the more antisemitic remarks in footage from the September event.
In that footage, Richardson mentioned his grandfather while questioning the Holocaust and “that narrative that my grandfather ... thought he was fighting against”. “I don’t know what necessarily happened in 1940s Germany,” he said. “That narrative needs to be destroyed because that narrative is destroying us from having any political representation.”
Richardson’s defence team had conceded that he performed the gesture. But Foster said the context was important, and he was satisfied that Richardson had been “trying to demonstrate that he clearly wasn’t Adolf Hitler” when he performed it. He could not find that the soap star was showing the “loyalty, affiliation or obedience” to the Nazi party an expert historian had previously told the court accompanied the gesture.
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“He was doing it to either mock himself or mock The Age newspaper,” Foster said.
Australia’s most prominent neo-Nazi group, the National Socialist Network, also attended and livestreamed another event organised by Trihey months earlier at which Richardson spoke and was cheered by neo-Nazis.
Since retiring from acting in 2021, Richardson has tried his hand at politics, running unsuccessfully as a candidate in 2022 for the far-right Freedom Party.
He previously told the court that his own neighbours had tried to “shame” him for his far-right views, which include pushing the false conspiracy of white replacement theory.
A month before the September event, Richardson told this masthead that if anyone dared to mention it, “they call you a racist”. “Well, call me it,” Richardson said. “I’m beyond caring.”
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