Jewish Australian falsely identified as Sydney mall attacker secures services of leading defamation litigator

A Jewish Australian university student falsely identified as the perpetrator of Saturday’s stabbing attack in a Sydney mall has secured the services of a leading Australian defamation litigator.

The Australian Financial Review reports that Ben Cohen, 20, will engage with attorney Rebeka Giles to sue for damages after Australia’s 7 News briefly named Cohen as the assailant in the stabbing attack at the Westfield shopping center near east Sydney’s Bondi junction.

The real attacker, who was shot dead after killing six people and injuring several others — including a baby — was on Sunday morning identified by police as Joel Cauchi, 40, from Queensland, Australia. According to the police, Cauchi appeared to have targeted women specifically, and the attack was related to unspecified mental health problems, rather than terrorism.

Neighbors of Cauchi’s parents who spoke to the British Daily Mail described the couple as “very religious” ex-Catholics. Discourse on social media had earlier run wild with speculation that the Sydney mall attacker was Jewish or Muslim.

The 7 News segment naming Cohen, which had aired earlier Sunday morning and was subsequently retracted, had relied on falsities promulgated the day before by antisemitic conspiracy theorists on social media. The channel blamed “human error” for its inaccurate reporting.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, together with disinformation expert Marc Owen Jones and the White Rose Society, an anti-fascist research group, traced the falsehood back to Simeon Boikov, who goes by “Aussie Cossack” on social media platform X.

ABC reports that Boikov, an acolyte of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has lived in Russia’s consulate in Sydney for the past year, and had asked for political asylum in Russia as he seeks to avoid an arrest warrant for alleged assault.

The lie, which Boikov began promoting about an hour after the afternoon attack, was viral by midnight with the aid of numerous antisemitic X accounts barely hiding their glee at the alleged assailant’s Jewish surname.

“It’s extremely disappointing to see thousands of people mindlessly propagating misinformation without even the slightest thought put to fact-checking or real-life consequences, and then using that information to push an agenda and spread hatred,” Cohen told ABC.