After the book.
8 October 2026
The book had to end somewhere
Margie Thomson's Whale Oil came out in 2019. It’s the most accurate account of what Cameron Slater did to me and what I did about it, and I still get asked the same question by people who have read it: what happened next? Fair question. The book ends in April 2019 with a list of loose ends. A High Court hearing scheduled for 2020. Damages still to be determined. Slater newly bankrupt. A police review that had been sitting with their lawyers for the best part of a year.
Margie signed off with a line about Lofty Blomfield's grandson being the guy who would never give up. A page earlier she had written something less flattering and more honest: that I’d be fine, if I could just stay afloat long enough.
A book has to end somewhere. The case didn't. This is the part she never got to write, and in one important respect it’s a better story than the one she did, because it has an ending.
Five more years
The 2020 trial date went the way most things did in 2020. Covid took the fixture, and when the courts reopened there was a queue. Slater had told the court in April 2019 that he would take no further part in the proceeding, and he kept his word on that at least. The company behind the blog was in liquidation. The case was mine to finish or to drop.
Plenty of people suggested dropping it. The man was bankrupt. There would be no money. What was the point? The point was that the allegations were still sitting on the internet with nothing beside them to say they were false, and the only thing that could put that right was a judgment. So I kept going, and when I could no longer afford counsel, I went on without.
It also helps to understand that the defamation case was never the only case. Running alongside it were two judicial reviews, a Human Rights Review Tribunal proceeding that produced its own judgment, and a couple of appeals on top of that. At times I had several sets of proceedings open at once, each with its own timetable, its own bundle and its own judge. People picture one court case. It was a portfolio.
The hearing was finally allocated for 4 and 5 September 2023. I walked into the High Court at Auckland eleven years after I first walked into the Manukau District Court to file the claim, and I walked in alone. Because the defence had abandoned the field, the court appointed William Akel, one of this country's most experienced defamation barristers, as amicus curiae. His job was to test my case as if Slater were still in the room. He cross-examined me. He cross-examined my witnesses. I am glad it happened that way. A win against nobody isn’t worth much. A win after your evidence has been pulled apart by a senior defamation barrister and has held is worth a great deal.
Judgment came on 20 February 2024. Justice Johnstone found eight of the nine posts I had sued on were false and seriously defamatory. He found that Whale Oil had obtained my files unlawfully and knew it, that it had chosen to facilitate a personal vendetta, that it had published allegations it either knew to be false or didn’t care about, and that it had then spent years obstructing the court rather than facing a trial. He described the campaign as a wholesale attack, undertaken maliciously. He awarded $475,000 in compensatory and aggravated damages, one of the larger defamation awards this country has seen, and declined punitive damages for the only reason left: there was nobody solvent to pay them.
I will never see the money. I knew that walking in. What I got instead is a public judgment, 128 paragraphs long, that says in a judge's words what I’d been saying in my own since 2012. Anyone can read it. For the first time in twelve years, when somebody searched my name, the truth came up alongside the lies, and it came with a court seal on it.
What eleven years in court teaches you
I didn’t set out to get an education. I got one anyway, and it’s the most expensive one I own. Four things stand out.
The system is slow, but it works if you refuse to go away. The judgment itself records that the delay was largely caused by the other side: appeals that were abandoned, pleadings that were never fixed, a trial adjourned on the promise of an appeal that never happened. None of that was in my control. What was in my control was turning up to every conference, meeting every timetable, and filing every document on time for more than a decade. Courts notice who does that. Eventually it counts.
Documents win. Every one of the posts was built from my own files, twisted into something they didn’t say. The same files, read properly, proved my case. Justice Johnstone put it plainly: the inaccuracy of the posts was apparent on a careful review of the source material. The lesson I give clients now is the one I lived. Keep everything. Date everything. The paper will still be there when the shouting stops.
Institutions follow the loudest voice until somebody makes them look. That was true of the police, of some of the professionals I dealt with, and at times of the courts themselves in the early years. It’s not a reason to give up on institutions. It’s a reason to put the evidence in front of them so clearly that looking away stops being an option. When the High Court finally looked, it got it right.
Nobody does this alone, even when they are standing alone. I have a wife and daughters who lived every day of it. I had a lawyer who took me on when I had nothing. I had a journalist who spent two years writing the book, and another who became a friend because of it. I had people who sent a message at the right moment and people who had my back for the whole decade without once asking what was in it for them. I may have been self-represented at the hearing, but I was never unsupported, and the difference between those two things is the difference between finishing and not.
Not everybody stayed. Some people who had been very close to me turned and ran the other way at the first sign of trouble, and they did it fast. That stung at the time. In hindsight it answered a question about what sort of people they were, and it saved me the trouble of finding out later at greater cost. The ones who stayed are the ones I keep.
What any of this has to do with Blomfield
Margie's book records that in 2019, with the case still unresolved, I enrolled in a law degree at AUT and planned to study while working full time. That wasn’t a whim. By then the business was already taking shape. While my own cases were running, lawyers and their clients had started asking me to help with theirs: the discovery, the chronology, the financial analysis, the strategy. One case became ten, ten became dozens, and over the decade it has run to hundreds upon hundreds of court cases worked on for other people.
Blomfield Consulting does restructuring, insolvency, IRD negotiations, employment relations, commercial disputes, property development and business turnaround, mostly for owner-led and mid-market New Zealand businesses, and we support litigation when it can’t be avoided. Every one of those services I first had to perform for myself, under pressure, with my own name and family on the line. I learned to read a judgment because I had to. I ran a discovery process because nobody else was going to. I worked out how to keep a business alive while fighting a case that was eating it, because the alternative was losing both. I’ve been on both sides of an insolvency, and I know the difference between a bankruptcy that’s a tool and one that’s a verdict.
That’s what clients get from us. When somebody walks in with a dispute that has eaten two years and most of their sleep, I don’t need the feeling explained. When a director is staring at an IRD arrears letter or a liquidator's demand and can’t see past Friday, I’ve sat in that chair. Experience is pattern recognition, and I've seen most of these patterns before.
The business isn’t just me anymore, and that’s the part I’m proudest of. The team around me is exceptional. Every one of them carries the approach I wanted in this business from the start: do the work properly, tell the client the truth, and don’t go away. It takes us about three months to hire a new person, because we’re selective about who comes in, and the result is a group of people I couldn’t improve on if I tried.
It also shapes the advice. I’m the wrong person to come to if you want to be told to give up, and the right person if you want a plain assessment of what it will cost to carry on. The hardest conversations I have with clients are about exactly that: whether a fight is worth having, and if it is, how to run it so it ends. I spent eleven years learning the answer. Most people can’t afford to, and they shouldn’t have to.
Better than afloat
On the October evening in 2018 when Justice Davison's ruling came through, Margie describes my family out on the street trying the new electric scooters that had just arrived in Auckland. Those girls are adults now. The business that was laying off staff in the months before the 2018 trial has grown into a firm with a team, an office in Rosedale and clients who come to us precisely because of what we’ve been through, not in spite of it.
The book was called Whale Oil. If there were a sequel it would need a duller title, because the interesting part is over. Dull is what I spent eleven years trying to get back to, and I recommend it.
Margie wrote that I’d be fine if I could just stay afloat long enough. Afloat doesn't cut it. My daughters are thriving, my family and friends are great, and the business is going really well. The judgment is public, the firm is open, and the kettle is on.
If you want to read the judgment, search Blomfield v Slater [2024] NZHC 228. If you want a copy of the book, email me. I still have a few.