Ben Roberts-Smith
Who is Ben Roberts-Smith?
What awards did Ben Roberts-Smith receive for his military service?
What was the outcome of Ben Roberts-Smith’s defamation case against Australian media outlets?
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Ben Roberts-Smith, is an Australian media executive and former special forces soldier who is widely referred to as his country’s “most decorated living soldier.” Since 2018 Roberts-Smith has been at the center of an unfolding international scandal after several of Australia’s largest newspapers reported that he had brutally and unlawfully killed several Afghans during military deployments. In April 2026 he was charged with five counts of the war crime of murder.
Family and early life
Roberts-Smith grew up in Perth, Western Australia. His father was Maj. Gen. Len Roberts-Smith, a former justice of the Supreme Court of Western Australia. Ben Roberts-Smith attended one of the region’s most elite schools but struggled academically. At the same time he grew to more than six and a half feet (2 meters) tall and developed a reputation for intimidating other students.
Military career and the Afghanistan War
Roberts-Smith joined the military in 1996, serving in the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment (3RAR). One officer later told Australian journalist Chris Masters that Roberts-Smith intimidated some soldiers because of his size and the rest “because of his connections.” The 3RAR was known for a culture of bullying, which was reportedly sanctioned by the higher-ups. Roberts-Smith went on deployments to East Timor and Malaysia. By 2001 he had been promoted to corporal, and in 2003 he passed a grueling test to join the Special Air Service Regiment. Over the following decade he was deployed repeatedly to Afghanistan.
“He was seen by many as a serious soldier who did not suffer fools,” Masters wrote in Flawed Hero, his 2023 book on Roberts-Smith, calling him “a ‘massive unit,’ a ‘killing machine.’ ” One sergeant who had served alongside him told Masters that Roberts-Smith was “a little boy inside a big body, not too bright and hard to get close to.”
After a 2006 mission to Afghanistan, Roberts-Smith received the Medal for Gallantry for defending his patrol as a sniper under heavy fire from the enemy. However, one fellow soldier told Australian journalist Nick McKenzie that during or shortly after the mission in question, Roberts-Smith threatened to shoot him in the back of the head. In 2011 Roberts-Smith received the Victoria Cross for Australia for his actions in another Afghanistan mission. He became known as “Australia’s most decorated soldier.”
War crime accusations and trials
In 2013 Roberts-Smith left the military for a corporate career. By this time he and his wife, Emma, had two young daughters. After earning a business degree from the University of Queensland, Roberts-Smith was offered a job as general manager of Queensland operations for Seven West Media, one of Australia’s largest media companies, even though, as he himself put it, he knew “nothing about the television industry.” Some of his new colleagues joked that it would have been hard to find a less qualified person.
In 2018 Masters and McKenzie published explosive stories revealing that an unidentified Australian special forces soldier had kicked a handcuffed man off a cliff during an assault on an Afghan village in 2012. In subsequent reporting Roberts-Smith was named as the accused soldier. Later in 2018 the Australian Federal Police announced they were investigating Roberts-Smith for potential war crimes in Afghanistan.
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Roberts-Smith sued the newspapers that broke the story: The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Canberra Times. The case went to trial in 2021, and representatives of the newspapers testified that, according to their reporting, Roberts-Smith had been involved in the killings of six civilians. Roberts-Smith strenuously denied the allegations, saying that five of the deaths occurred during combat and that the sixth never happened. However, three Afghan witnesses backed up the story about Roberts-Smith kicking a man off a cliff.
A judge ultimately dismissed the defamation case, finding that the newspapers’ allegations were “substantially true.” Roberts-Smith resigned from his job immediately after the decision and appealed the ruling. The case went on for a total of seven years, becoming known as Australia’s “trial of the century,” before Roberts-Smith lost conclusively in 2025.
In April 2026 Roberts-Smith was arrested by federal police at the Sydney Airport. He was charged with five counts of the war crime of murder. The judge presiding over the case said it would take “possibly years and years” for the trial to begin.