Sports scientist Stephen Dank has vowed to fight on after being told he will have to pay two sets of legal bills and won't be awarded damages following a failed defamation suit against a Sydney tabloid.
Mr Dank was seeking aggravated damages from Nationwide News, publisher of The Sunday Telegraph and The Daily Telegraph, over a series of 2013 articles about his controversial supplements program at the Cronulla Sharks NRL club.
But following Friday's judgment, AAP understands he will face a legal bill in excess of $2 million.
Mr Dank had a minor win on Tuesday, following a month-long trial at the NSW Supreme Court, with the four-person jury finding he was defamed in an article that suggested he injected Cronulla players with the blood thinner warfarin.
That was untrue as the substance wasn't warfarin but was a feed supplement for horses, Justice Lucy McCallum found.
"It might have sounded harmless, but it had not been appropriately tested for therapeutic use by humans," she said.
"It should not have been used on football players."
Mr Dank lost his case against two further sets of articles relating to the peptides supplements regime at the club.
The jury on Monday found he had acted with "reckless indifference" towards NRL player Jon Mannah's life by giving him dangerous peptides that may have accelerated his death from cancer.
Mannah made his debut for Cronulla in 2011 and died two years later aged 23, after his Hodgkin's lymphoma relapsed.
The jurors agreed Mr Dank had established that the meanings conveyed in the articles were defamatory but, critically, they were also substantially true.
Another report complained about did not contain defamatory remarks linking Mr Dank to Mannah's death, the jury found.
"The article was carefully written," Justice McCallum said on Friday.
"The newspaper argued that it merely reported the fact that the information in question had been handed to police and did not pre-judge the issue of Mr Dank's involvement in Mr Mannah's death."
On Friday, another chapter in the Dank saga was concluded, with Justice McCallum ordering him to pay all legal costs associated with the trial. He was also denied damages.
About an hour after the decision, Mr Dank denied it was a bad result and said he would be appealing.
"I'm fine," he said when asked about his finances.
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