Andrew Rule

Andrew Rule (born 8 April 1957) is an Australian journalist who specialises in crime.

Andrew Rule was born in country Victoria in 1957, later attending high school in Sale.

He dropped out of journalism at RMIT before completing an arts degree at Monash University.

Rule started aged 17 as a reporter for The Gippsland Times and Maffra Spectator. He subsequently worked for The Age, The Sun News-Pictorial, The Herald, Sunday Age, Herald Sun, and at radio station 3AW.

The Murders of Margaret and Seana Tapp was a cold case that Rule has worked to bring renewed attention to in articles for both The Age and Herald Sun.

Rule wrote an authorised biography of Australian media proprietor and billionaire Kerry Stokes to counter bad press from an unauthorised work by Margaret Simons that included testimony from an abandoned family.

In 2021, Rule was involved in a controversy where he falsely accused the late former Labor Premier Neville Wran of corruption.

The reports on which his commentary and claims were based were found to be false in an ABC Editorial Review.

He was also twice (1994; 2001) the recipient of the Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year Award.

Rule is married to Di Rule who ran as a Liberal Party candidate for Seymour in the 1999 state election and Burwood in the 2002 state election.

His wife was accused by political opponents of benefiting from sinecures when she was appointed to a Victorian government board after serving as a long-time staffer for former Liberal leader and Premier Ted Baillieu.

Rule has authored a number of books:

With John Silvester, he co-wrote the Underbelly series of books about crime which were subsequently adapted into a TV series.

Rule is an inductee in The Australian Media Hall of Fame.

In 2001, he won the Gold Walkley award for his story Geoff Clarke: Power and rape.