Reporter Tara Brown has returned to work at 60 Minutes.

Despite being jailed over the international incident, Brown escaped serious kidnapping charges and was lucky to keep her (albeit tarnished) TV job after a plan to grab back custody of Brisbane mother Sally Faulkner’s two children from a South Beirut street went horribly wrong.

The botched snatch-and-run mission landed Faulkner, Brown and her three-man TV crew in Baabda prison, along with Australian-born recovery agent Adam Whittington and two of his staffers — the latter only due to be bailed this week, after almost five months behind bars.

Brown’s colleague and producer Stephen Rice, sacked for his part in the saga at the behest of Nine boss Hugh Marks, is still pursuing the network for unfair dismissal.

The embattled reporter took stress leave until the findings of Nine’s “independent” review were released on May 27, but was back at its Willoughby headquarters by early June.

Policemen escort Tara Brown from a Lebanese courthouse to Baabda Prison for women. Picture: AFPSource:Supplied

On a recent visit to the Sydney station, TV Insider spied Brown chatting happily with co-workers — in full hair and make-up, apparently ahead of recording new footage for the show’s opening and closing credits.

However, no story by Brown has been broadcast in the aftermath of Beirut. Her last appearance on the program followed the crew’s return to Sydney after two weeks in jail, in a follow-up interview with fellow reporter Michael Usher.

The loved ones of Brown, Rice, sound recordist David Ballment and cameraman Ben Williamson, were filmed being reunited in a Sydney hotel; but Brown did herself few favours when she expressed her dismay at being so misunderstood by the Lebanese authorities, stating: “I thought when we presented ourselves (in court) and were being questioned, I really thought: ‘We’re journalists, we’re doing our jobs’, they will see reason, they’ll understand that, you know, that we are here just to do a story on a very, very desperate mother. And I just thought
that reason would prevail, and it didn’t.”

Faulkner, who’s been cut off from contacting her children by their father Eli Alamine, still faces a jail term if found guilty on her charge of kidnapping.