Sunrise did not seek comment from Cohen’s family before identifying him just after 6am on Sunday, this masthead was told.
Cohen’s family told the ABC that Seven News had explained the error as the fault of a junior social media editor.
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This was then repeated by Sunrise presenter Matt Shirvington, among others, live on air.
An official statement from a spokesman for Seven said it was “human error”.
“It was escalated immediately and rectified. Seven sincerely apologises for the error,” the spokesman said.
Sources close to Cohen’s legal camp, speaking anonymously as the legal action is in its initial stages, said it was a basic case of mistaken identity and believe Seven will look to settle before going to court.
Seven was asked if it would look to settle but declined to comment.
George’s partner, Rebekah Giles, was a close friend of one of the Bondi victims, Ashlee Good.
Giles recently acted for former Spotlight producer Taylor Auerbach, who appeared in the Federal Court this month as a witness in Bruce Lehrmann’s defamation suit against Network Ten.
Seven has faced intense scrutiny this month over its efforts to secure an exclusive interview with Lehrmann over several months spanning 2022 and 2023. On Monday, Justice Michael Lee found that, on the balance of probabilities, Lehrmann did rape former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins.
It is not the first time Seven, or other media outlets have misidentified the perpetrator of a major crime incident.
In 2022, Seven paid an undisclosed fee to a West Australian man, Terrance Flowers, after wrongly identifying him as the abductor of four-year-old Cleo Smith.
Flowers, a 27-year-old Nyamal man living in Karratha, was identified as Terence Kelly, a 36-year-old living in Carnarvon, who later pleaded guilty to kidnapping Cleo.
In 2014, Fairfax Media, at the time the publisher of this masthead, wrongly identified 19-year-old Abu Bakar Alam as suspected terrorist Numan Haider. The teenager’s photograph appeared on the front page of The Age newspaper, and in other print and online Fairfax Media publications.
He later reached a settlement with Fairfax, with an apology on The Age front page.
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