JUDY DAVIS - DAVIS HITS BACK AT CHILD-HATER ALLEGATIONS

DAVIS HITS BACK AT CHILD-HATER ALLEGATIONS

Actress JUDY DAVIS has testified in court against an Australian newspaper, accusing the tabloid's bosses of depicting her as a child-hater after she suggested authorities move a local soccer park so residents are not hit by stray balls.
The Australian native, best known for her role in 1984's A Passage To India, which earned her a Best Actress Academy Award nomination, appeared at a local council meeting in 2006 to discuss the location of a sportspark near her Sydney home.
At the meeting, the star suggested the park be moved to another venue, to avoid residents being hit while junior teams are training there.
But Davis, 53, was outraged at the press coverage of the event, and launched legal action against Sydney paper The Daily Telegraph - accusing the publication of defamation over a series of articles which appeared in February 2006.
Giving evidence at the New South Wales Supreme Court on Tuesday (06May08), she said: "I was dumbfounded really that The Daily Telegraph would do that to me. I couldn't understand why they had done it.
"It seemed to me that they were running a bit of a campaign against me, some kind of vendetta."
But Davis insists the real victim of the situation is her young daughter, who was eight at the time.
She added, "The parents of the girls in her class might not want her to play with them, because her mother (according to the newspaper) doesn't like children. And maybe the soccer team that she's just joined... might not want her in the team. They're very big things in a young girl's life."