The court judgment has been delivered and the salacious battle between Amber Harrison and her former Channel Seven boss Tim Worner is over. Goliath won and David, his former mistress, looks set to be bankrupted.

There is no tell-all book or 60 Minutes interview with Harrison to be had on the rival Nine Network. She is the subject of a gag order.

The opinion battlelines will now be fully drawn between those who believe Harrison was the sacrificial lamb, made a victim of the male-dominated corporate culture, or those who believe her to be the vindictive, spurned lover of a powerful executive.

But the ultimate and complete defeat at the hands of her large and well-resourced adversary just came down to matter of law – she breached the confidentiality conditions of her agreement with Seven about the relationship with Worner.

With the value of hindsight Harrison did not play this battle strategically. She was brave to take on the might of an organisation the size of Seven, which has a reputation for playing legal battles very hard.

The saga may have played out differently in some other organisation, but from the start it was abundantly clear Seven was not about to sacrifice its chief executive, Worner, in order to adhere to the niceties of textbook corporate governance.

Two things were going against Harrison. The first was that Worner was seen as one of the most, if not the most, talented television executive in town. And at a time when the free-to-air television industry is in a state of decline, the company believed it could ill-afford to lose him.

Her second problem is that Seven is controlled by Kerry Stokes and what he says goes. He was sticking with his man.

Stokes was prepared to wear the massive public relations onslaught and ride it out. Most companies would not have.

Seven agreed to give Harrison money when it became aware of the Worner affair even though it had also accused her of rorting hundreds of thousands of dollars of expenses – again demonstrating how desperate it was to keep Worner in the top job.

By way of stark contrast, one need only look at the AFL relationship scandals that have emerged over the past week. The male executives were left no choice but to resign despite the fact that the females with whom they had had affairs had not registered complaints.

The AFL's degree of zero tolerance itself sparked plenty of commentary on whether the punishments dwarfed the crimes.

Harrison could have mitigated the damage at several points in this battle but was determined to go down fighting. She took the affair public because (at the time) she thought she had nowhere else to go.

She adroitly used the media – particularly social media – to place maximum pressure on Seven, which in turn used the courts to shut her down. Twitter was her weapon of choice.

But Seven was not about to be embarrassed off the battlefield.

It became a bitter court fight that the presiding judge, Justice John Sackar, described as being "from the outset ... engulfed in a vitriolic atmosphere".

"The allegations from both sides, whether entirely true or not, have often been personal, scandalous, and sadly ripe for media and public consumption."

In her last ditch plea, delivered to the court last week, Harrison said Seven had waged a "brutal, unnecessary [and] protracted" legal battle against her and a costs order would "drive me into bankruptcy".

But there was no leniency from Sackar who noted that "numerous epithets" had been used to describe Harrison and her motivations but he did not "feel the need to join in the histrionics".

Now as this chapter closes it is clear that Harrison and Worner made mistakes. The court's decision to order Harrison to pay costs may be legally appropriate but for Seven to bankrupt her doesn't seem like a fair fight.