Four Facebook posts, a page with a little over 2,000 followers, and a business that stopped earning almost immediately. That is the commercial story inside the High Court’s decision to award Brendon Te Waati $200,000 in damages against Nga Atawhainga Adrianna Creagh. Business owners should read it as a risk register entry, not a celebrity court report.
Te Waati, founder of Te Whare Āio, runs wānanga and seminars on Māori wellbeing in New Zealand and overseas. In 2025, four years after a brief relationship ended, Creagh posted serious false allegations about him. In the first two posts she tagged Te Aho Matua, the organisation behind Māori-language immersion schools, putting the claims directly in front of his professional network.
The revenue line went flat
The monthly revenue of his trading company, Māori Movement, fell to zero and stayed there. Justice Jane Anderson described it as an “almost overnight effect”, quoting Te Waati’s own evidence that “work has dried up”. A long-standing client cancelled forward bookings for 24 wānanga, citing the allegations. Four national and four international seminar appearances went too.
That is what reputational damage looks like for a sole trader or small professional services firm. There was no brand team to absorb the hit and no diversified customer base to dilute it. Trust was the product, and when trust went, so did the invoices.
The court found the posts were presented as fact rather than opinion and that Creagh had no arguable defence. The award covers harm to reputation, vindication and distress, not simply the lost income.
Courts have settled on a price
Te Waati’s case is not a one-off. In August, Wellington businessman Amandeep Bakshi was awarded $200,000 over a TikTok video that never named him but described a Wellington employer who “owns many shops”. Justice Dunningham found insufficient evidence the video had hurt his business, yet still awarded the same headline figure for reputational harm and distress.
The contrast matters. Bakshi shows the courts will award six figures without proof of lost trade. Te Waati shows what hard financial evidence, bank records and cancelled contracts, adds to the picture.
Go back to 2024 and the bill was bigger still. The High Court awarded nearly $842,000 in damages and costs against defendants who falsely claimed a charity founder had misappropriated funds, including punitive damages after one defendant fabricated chatlogs. Deliberate fabrication, it turns out, gets expensive fast.
Nobody regulates the angry ex
Broadcasters answer to a standards body that publishes an annual report on its complaints work. A disgruntled former employee, partner or customer with a Facebook page answers to nobody until a judge gets involved. For most small businesses, the threat is not a newspaper. It is an individual with a phone.
In 2025, Chris Keall’s analysis of the Metro Paws case showed how a former employee’s posts, shared more than 200 times, forced a doggy daycare owner to pull herself and her business off social media to protect staff. He noted the Harmful Digital Communications Act offered another route for owners under attack.
The warning signs were visible years earlier. Back in 2021, Small Business Voice’s Max Whitehead said social media was “one of the best tools for small businesses” but that constant monitoring wasted time owners could spend making money. That tension has not gone away. It has just acquired case law.
Winning is not the same as getting paid
Here is the part most coverage skips. Creagh told the court she was “entirely judgment-proof” and ignored the proceedings for months. A $200,000 judgment against someone with no assets is vindication, and the court record helps rebuild a reputation, but it will not replace two years of lost wānanga bookings.
Te Waati did the sensible things. His lawyers sought a retraction and an undertaking in October 2024. Creagh removed the posts but never retracted or signed. Simpson Grierson’s guidance on defamation and social media makes the general point that how quickly content comes down, and how widely it spread, shapes the outcome.
Treat it like any other balance-sheet risk
The practical takeaway is unglamorous. Keep monthly revenue records clean and current, because they become your evidence. Document cancellations and the reasons clients give. Set up basic monitoring of your name and business, and have a lawyer you can call the same week a damaging post appears. Check whether your insurance covers reputational loss or legal costs, because the defendant may never pay.
The case drew coverage across major outlets, and the courts are clearly willing to put a serious number on online lies. That is welcome. But the best outcome for a business is never the judgment. It is catching the damage early enough that the revenue line never hits zero.
Sources
- NZ Herald: Māori wellness expert Brendon Te Waati awarded $200,000 over defamatory Facebook claims (2026-10-30)
- RNZ: Māori wellness expert Brendon Te Waati awarded $200,000 over defamatory Facebook claims (2026-10-31)
- RNZ: Wellington businessman Amandeep Bakshi awarded $200,000 after High Court finds TikTok video defamatory (2026-08-22)
- NZ Herald: False rumours spread via Facebook end with $842k defamation award (2024-09-03)
- Broadcasting Standards Authority: Annual Report 2025 (2025)
- NZ Herald: Tech Insider – High Court case has two big lessons for small business owners facing social media attacks (2025-03-24)
- RNZ: Australian media ruling could change landscape in NZ (2021-09-15)
- Simpson Grierson: Pause before you post – defamation risks and social media
- The Gist: Māori wellness expert Brendon Te Waati awarded $200,000 over defamatory Facebook claims (2026-10-30)
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