Amanda Meade | April 09, 2008
NINE'S 60 Minutes paid South Australian father John Deaves and his daughter Jenny to talk about their incestuous relationship on television - even though they had a criminal history.
The program also chose to ignore salient facts that were available in court transcripts from their recent trial for incest.
The couple discussed the death of their first child in an interview published by a British magazine last month. Jackson died from a heart condition in 2001, four days after his birth, according to Closer Online.
But the fact that the father and daughter had produced a baby born with congenital heart disease who died shortly after birth was left out of reporter Peter Overton's report on 60 Minutes on Sunday night.
This is the second time Overton has been accused of missing the story in a paid interview. Overton's 60 Minutes report about Qantas hostess Lisa Robertson having sex in an aircraft toilet with actor Ralph Fiennes did not include the information that Robertson also worked as a prostitute.
The Deaves report focused on the couple's only living daughter, Celeste, and how apparently normal she is. Overton said: "Nine-month-old Celeste seems blissfully happy and perfectly healthy. Despite the odds."
The executive producer of 60 Minutes, Hamish Thomson, would not be drawn on why the program omitted to mention the couple's first baby.
"We're doing an update this Sunday when we are going to address all the issues relative to the story," he said.
"(The first baby) is one of the things we'll be talking about this Sunday in our mail section," Thomson said. "We're going to be running additional interview material with them. They may even be doing a blog themselves.
"They've obviously received a fair amount of attention from locals in Mount Gambier and they are fairly distressed about the reaction."
Deaves's third wife, Dorothy, told Nine's Today show yesterday the father and daughter had not been apart for 30 years, as claimed, but Jenny had stayed at her house four times until 2000 when the relationship began.
Dorothy also revealed that a daughter from Deaves's second marriage had been traumatised to learn of her father's incestuous relationship with Jenny for the first time when it aired on Sunday night.
A child protection advocate called for the Deaves couple to be forcibly sterilised to stop them having more children.
Professor Freda Briggs of the University of South Australia told the ABC yesterday judges should use a more powerful deterrent than a good behaviour bond. "My controversial suggestion was ... for the mother, for example, to have her tubes tied or the father-come-grandfather to be sterilised," she said.