Golf club owner Kerri-Anne Kennerley is suing over husband's fall is a long-time "friend"
On the evening of March 6, 2016, Australian TV personality Kerri-Anne Kennerley’s life changed forever after her husband John fell from a verandah at the Bonville International Golf Resort which caused him to fracture his C3 and C4 vertebrae.
He was paralysed from the neck down following the incident and sadly passed away three years later in March 2019 at the age of 73.
Now, news has emerged that the golf course is being sued for negligence due to the accident, but the place is owned by a friend of Kerri-Anne’s as well as being a former Australian Olympian.
Peter Montgomery, 69, represented Australia in four Olympic campaigns from 1972 to 1984 before serving as chairman of the Australian Olympic Committee Athletes’ Commission and vice-president of the AOC from 2001 to 2016, according to The Daily Telegraph.
The real estate portfolio owned by Montgomery includes the Bonville International Golf Resort, which is now being sued for unspecified damages, interests and costs filed by John Kennerley five months before his death.
Montgomery’s company Ironhill Services has denied that the fall was its fault and that the accident occurred due to John not looking where he was walking.
"The defendant says if the plaintiff suffered injury, loss and damage as alleged, such injury, loss and damage was caused or contributed to by the plaintiff's own negligence," read the court document in an NSW Supreme Court filing.
Ironhill claim that John “failed to look where he was walking, stepping into a garden bed (and) failing to take care not to step onto an object, prize, on the floor”.
However, John’s lawyers are arguing that a “reasonable person” from the golf resort’s perspective would have implemented measures to ensure patrons cannot get hurt at the golf course residence.
Kerri-Anne spoke to News Corp earlier this week about the incident.
"John and I survived for three years but other people could not and that does actually make me angry,” she said.
"Whatever the circumstances are, for an accident for any insurance company to drag something out for almost three-and-a-half years is despicable."
The incident is said to have strained things between the former friends, but John Eales, an ambassador of Bonville Golf Resort, has said that Montgomery is “a man of the highest integrity”.