On the day a judge ruled the Victoria Cross winner had lost his defamation case and been proven to be a war criminal, Roberts-Smith didn’t turn up to court
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In the end, the attention was on the man who wasn’t there.
All two metres of Ben Roberts-Smith was glaringly absent from the packed, anxious room in Sydney’s federal court building, as a judge quietly explained that the man once revered as the most famous soldier of his generation was, on the balance of probabilities, a murderer who callously killed unarmed civilians while serving in Australia’s military in Afghanistan.
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