Justice Owen Paulsen: Four Cases That Raised Questions

This article is part of a broader series examining the New Zealand legal landscape through cases connected to Danny De Hek. By studying the judicial history of the public officials who have presided over De Hek-related proceedings, we hope to better understand how the legal process works in New Zealand, especially when power, reputation, public money, media access, and judicial discretion collide.

We begin with Justice Owen Paulsen, the judge who later issued the High Court costs decision in McCullah v De Hek, and ask a simple question: what does his wider judicial record reveal when placed under the microscope?

Here are some cases involving Justice Paulsen which, in our opinion, deserve closer public attention.

Convicted Sex Offender Who Avoided Jail: Howard Temple

TL;DR: Howard Temple was an 85-year-old former Gloriavale leader who pleaded guilty to sexual offending involving girls and young women over two decades. He had been sentenced to prison. Justice Paulsen quashed that jail sentence and replaced it with home detention.

Some cases land in the public mind instantly, and the Howard Temple case is one of them.

Temple was the former leader of Gloriavale, the isolated Christian community near Greymouth that has spent years under public scrutiny over control, labor, education, abuse, and the treatment of women and children. Temple was 85 when he pleaded guilty to 12 charges, including indecent assault, involving young women and girls between 2002 and 2022. 1News reported that his crimes were against members of the community where he had been a senior leader.

The District Court sentenced Temple to 26 months’ imprisonment. He appealed.

After allowing credit for Temple’s guilty pleas, willingness to participate in restorative justice, remorse, age, ill health, and restrictive bail conditions, the sentence fell into a range where home detention could be considered.

Temple was elderly, and his lawyer emphasized his mild cognitive impairment. A clinical psychologist said imprisonment would be especially harsh given his age, cognitive vulnerability, and limited ability to cope in prison. Paulsen found that home detention would still be a significant sentence for him.

So what? The bottom line is that Temple was a convicted sex offender. To many, the ruling appeared to extend considerable sympathy to the man who once held power inside a closed religious community.

Critics would argue that Temple was not an ordinary offender in an ordinary setting. He was a senior figure in Gloriavale. The offending involved girls and young women, and it happened over many years. The Crown reminded the court that Temple held high standing in that community, and with it, a greater responsibility to protect its members.

Again, so what?

The public’s bottom line is blunt: he committed crimes against girls and young women. The public is entitled to ask what message is sent when a former religious leader convicted of sexual offending avoids prison.

The court’s answer was that home detention could still punish, denounce, deter, and reflect Temple’s personal circumstances.

The public’s question is simpler, and harder to answer. When a court extends this much mercy to the man who held the power, how much room is left to reckon with what the victims actually endured? Every mitigating factor, including his age, health, standing, remorse, and frailty, risks quietly shifting attention away from the harm done to them.

If a man in power sexually offends inside a closed community, how old does he have to be before prison becomes too harsh for him, but not for the people he harmed?

The Mayor, Stonewood, and the Court Files: Boult, Crux, and Open Justice

TL;DR: In 2019, Associate Judge Paulsen refused media access to court files involving Queenstown Mayor Jim Boult and the collapsed Stonewood Homes. In 2022, he granted a different outlet access to those same kinds of documents. The story isn’t that the rulings differed – it’s what that difference cost the public in between.

Open justice sounds simple…until someone actually asks to see the documents.

In 2019, the Otago Daily Times reported that the High Court had turned down a request from Allied Press for access to files in litigation brought by the liquidators of Stonewood Homes Ltd against Queenstown Mayor Jim Boult. The claim: more than $28 million in damages, sought from Boult and former Stonewood managing director Brent Mettrick, over alleged breaches of director duties under the Companies Act.

The timing wasn’t incidental. Allied Press wanted access before a local government election. Their argument was straightforward: voters had a right to know. Associate Judge Paulsen declined – and turned down a similar request from Stuff.

His reasoning was this: no presumption in favor of disclosure. Publishing allegations and counter-allegations, he warned, could get in the way of a fair trial. Letting outsiders see evidence that might later turn out to be wrong, or thrown out entirely, would not serve the public interest – especially not before a trial had even started.

That’s the textbook answer – careful, defensible, the kind of ruling that survives an appeal.

Here’s the other answer – the one voters were never given a chance to hear.

A sitting mayor… a company he helped run, now collapsed. Liquidators alleging he breached his duties…creditors owed millions, left with nothing. And an election, days away, where voters were about to decide whether he deserved their trust again.

If that isn’t the public’s business, what is?

The story didn’t end there – in 2022, Crux reported that the High Court had granted it access to pleadings in the same Stonewood case. This time, Paulsen rejected Boult’s argument that there was no legitimate public interest left, since the claims had settled and the information existed elsewhere. Crux quoted him saying the public had a genuine interest in litigation over the collapse of a company group owing millions to creditors – and that Boult’s public office made that interest greater still.

So the same judge, looking at the same underlying dispute, later delivered a full-throated defense of the public’s right to know. That raises an obvious question: Why wasn’t Paulsen espousing the same principle in 2019?

The legal posture had changed, sure. But for the ordinary voter or the ordinary creditor, that didn’t soften the timeline. The door opened – but only after it stopped mattering when it opened. Only after the election had already happened. Only after the moment when disclosure could have actually changed something.

Nobody is arguing every allegation in a court file deserves a headline, but this is a question which won’t go away: when a mayor, a collapsed company, and millions of dollars in creditor claims all sit on the same file, does the public get to see enough – early enough – to make an informed decision? Or does it only get to see the file once the decision has already been made?

The Caveat the Supreme Court Restored: Melco Property Holdings v Hall

TL;DR: Associate Judge Paulsen ordered that Melco’s caveat over a Lower Hutt property lapse. The Court of Appeal agreed. The Supreme Court later overturned both – and ordered the caveat restored. No victims, no headlines, no politics. Just a clean example of Paulsen being overruled at the highest level in the country.

In Melco Property Holdings v Hall, Mr. Hall agreed to sell a commercial property at 5 Parliament Street, Lower Hutt, to Melco Property Holdings. The deal came with a due diligence condition. When Melco hadn’t confirmed or waived that condition by the deadline, Hall tried to cancel the agreement. Melco refused to accept the cancellation and lodged a caveat to protect its claimed interest in the property.

Everything turned on one question: had Hall validly terminated the deal, or not?

It allowed Melco’s appeal, set aside the Court of Appeal and High Court rulings, and ordered that the caveat stay in place.

Two lower courts had looked at the same facts and reached the same conclusion. The country’s highest court looked at those same facts and said: wrong.

That doesn’t make Paulsen’s original ruling scandalous; commercial law is full of hard calls on tight deadlines and technical contract language, and the Court of Appeal backed him. But this was not a minor correction – it was a fully restored legal protection that two courts in a row had stripped away.

They say everything’s backwards ‘down under’ in New Zealand. In this case, a straightforward commercial dispute escalated to an almost comical situation where the last word in Kiwi law said the first word was wrong.

And that leaves a simple, uncomfortable question: if the country’s highest court can look at the same case and land somewhere completely different, how much should really ride on a single judge’s first call?

The “Gagging Writ”: McCullah v De Hek

TL;DR: Stephen McCullah sued Danny De Hek for defamation over YouTube videos – then dropped the case the morning a costs hearing threatened to expose his finances. Associate Judge Paulsen hit him with indemnity costs, ruling the lawsuit was never about reputation. But before any judge touched this case, McCullah had already lost it in the court of public opinion – and New Zealand’s tall-poppy instinct made sure of that.

This is the case that brings the series home. Not because a judge protected the powerful – but because it shows what happens when litigation itself becomes the weapon, and how a culture’s own instincts can decide a case long before a courtroom does.

Stephen Andrew James McCullah, a US-based finance and investment entrepreneur, sued Danny De Hek and Danny De Hek Ltd in the New Zealand High Court under the Defamation Act 1992, over YouTube videos De Hek had made about him and his crypto-linked business activities.

McCullah didn’t go small. Seven causes of action. $500,000 in compensatory damages sought for each. Exemplary damages of up to $150,000 on top. This wasn’t a letter demanding a correction – it was a legal sledgehammer.

De Hek fought back on truth, honest opinion, qualified privilege, and public interest. Then he and his co-defendant applied for security for costs – asking the court to make McCullah put money on the table before the case could go further.

That’s when McCullah folded. On the morning the security-for-costs application was set to be heard, he discontinued the claim.

De Hek called it what he believed it was: a “gagging writ” – a lawsuit filed not to win, but to scare someone into silence. Associate Judge Paulsen agreed. He found McCullah never intended to take the case to trial, that the proceeding wasn’t brought to vindicate reputation or recover damages, but to stop De Hek publishing further. Paulsen awarded De Hek indemnity costs of $27,500 – trimmed down from the $35,666.96 he’d claimed.

To be clear: this is not a story about judicial bias. The judgment itself pushed back on McCullah’s own claim that he couldn’t get justice in New Zealand – his solicitors had written that he believed it was impossible to get a fair hearing over De Hek’s alleged online conduct. The court found that argument hard to follow, since the very proceeding he’d filed offered him a path to vindication and an injunction. The process, by the court’s own account, was open to him. He walked away from it.

The legal story ends there. The public story doesn’t.

Paulsen’s ruling was doctrinally sound – grounded in the Defamation Act‘s own legislative intent that proceedings not be used unreasonably, and in an established legal test for what a gagging writ looks like. Nothing on the record points to bias in the reasoning itself.

But the public verdict had already been delivered before the legal one caught up to it. And that’s the real question this case leaves behind: when a foreign plaintiff walks into a small country’s court system already cast as the villain of a story his own culture doesn’t know how to read, how much of what happens next is law – and how much is the crowd getting the ending it already wanted?

For a deeper look at the recurring themes across these cases, read the companion article: Justice Owen Paulsen: The Pattern Behind the Cases. 

That is why McCullah v De Hek is not just an add-on to this profile. It is the hinge.

The earlier cases show Justice Paulsen dealing with power from the bench: a former religious leader, a sitting mayor, public money in Tonga, and a commercial property fight corrected by the Supreme Court. McCullah v De Hek brings the same question closer to home. What happens when the court is not just deciding a dispute, but deciding whether the legal process itself has become part of the pressure campaign?

That is where this profile ends, but the larger question begins.

What This Does, and Does Not, Prove

Taken alone, each of these cases has its own legal explanation.

The Howard Temple appeal involved age, health, remorse, risk, bail conditions, and the legal threshold for replacing prison with home detention.

The Stonewood media-access decisions involved different stages of litigation, different documents, public-office concerns, reputation, fairness, and open justice.

The TongaSat case involved public money, foreign aid, royal proximity, and a court willing to declare major payments unlawful.

The Melco Property Holdings v Hall dispute involved contract law, caveats, due diligence, and a Supreme Court correction of the lower courts.

And McCullah v De Hek involved defamation, online criticism, reputation, costs, and the court’s finding that a lawsuit had crossed into “gagging writ” territory.

So no, this review does not establish corruption or misconduct. It does not say Justice Paulsen acted in bad faith. In some cases, particularly TongaSat and McCullah v De Hek, the record may show the opposite: a judge prepared to make findings that cut directly into elite power or legal intimidation. But public scrutiny does not begin only when misconduct is proven.

That is the mistake people make when discussing judges. They act as if the only two options are blind trust or proof of corruption. But there is a large space in between. That space is called public accountability.

Judges exercise public power. They decide whether a convicted offender goes to jail. They decide whether the media can see court files before an election. They decide whether public money was unlawfully paid. They decide whether property protections survive or lapse. They decide whether a defamation claim is a legitimate search for justice or a legal weapon aimed at silence.

That power deserves examination because it changes real lives.

The final question is not whether Justice Paulsen is a good judge or a bad judge. That is too simple, and frankly, too lazy. The better question is whether the public can see enough, understand enough, and trust enough when judges make decisions at the intersection of law, power, money, reputation, and punishment.

There is nothing improper about auditing the auditors.

Judges examine the conduct of others every day. They weigh credibility. They test motives. They decide who gets mercy, who gets access, who gets protection, and who pays the price.

Their own records should be able to withstand the same kind of careful public inspection. After all, trust in justice does not come from silence – it comes from seeing how justice works when it is placed under the microscope.

For the full breakdown of the De Hek-McCullah drama, including the lawsuit, the discontinued claim, and the “gagging writ” finding, and cultural reflections, read our companion article here: McCullah v De Hek: The “Gagging Writ” Case. 

Follow our blog – we publish reviews, rebuttal and commentary related to Christchurch-based commentator, YouTuber and anti-scam campaigner behind DeHek.com. De Hek’s public footprint spans YouTube, LinkedIn, X, RNZ references, and the wider podcast ecosystem, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and Podimo. He has also been discussed in public forums, including a widely shared Reddit thread calling him the “crypto Ponzi scheme avenger.”