Court Reporter

by Jamelle Wells

  There is a very short turnaround when one news channel presenting shift finishes and another starts. When the presenter on before you leaves there’s only one or two minutes to get in the chair, attach the microphone to your jacket and be ready to start. Somehow, the brilliant crew would just bundle me into the chair and hide my crutches discreetly under the desk by the time the banners rolled.

  My hairdresser Chantal Du Verge offered to come to my house to do my hair as she was mortified at the suggestion I would be back on camera with regrowth. She was even more horrified at how bland my walking frame was.

  ‘It needs more bling,’ she said.

  In November 2016 ICAC made corrupt conduct findings against a number of people who were called before the courthouse upgrade inquiry that I had started to cover before my accident. It found former capital works assistant director at the New South Wales Justice Department Assets Management Branch, Anthony Andjic, engaged in serious corrupt conduct. It also made six recommendations about ways to prevent corruption in the justice department.4

  Back at ICAC: Eman Sharobeem

  I made it back to ICAC in April 2017 for the public inquiry into 2015 Australian of the Year finalist Eman Sharobeem. It was a personal milestone as I stood outside the building in Elizabeth Street where the freak fall had taken away my independence almost two years earlier. The front of the building had been renovated and there were new escalators outside the building and hand railings.

  Up I went and signed in on the blue media sheet at the ICAC reception desk.

  Name.

  Media Organisation.

  Phone number.

  Have you read the ICAC media guidelines?

  Signature.

  I headed through the security check and into the media room which now seemed a little less full than I had seen it in previous years. There were three ABC reporters plus a camera crew, but only one reporter from each of the other media networks and some networks didn’t have anyone there at all. The Sydney Morning Herald reporters were about to go out on a week-long strike over a Fairfax Media proposal to cut 125 editorial staff jobs across the country. We felt for them in the media room because it was thanks to some of their fine investigative work that some of the ICAC inquiries we had covered over the years had come about.

  It hit me then, there would no longer be 2UE reporters like Derek Peterson and 2GB reporters like Katie Kimberly charging down the road together in pursuit of ICAC witnesses with their station microphone flags brandished high in the air because those two newsrooms were now one. When Fairfax Radio and Macquarie Radio merged, the final 2UE bulletin went to air from 2UE’s Greenwich studios at 6 p.m. on 9 April 2015 read by news director Matt McDonald. The bulletin led with a story about bail being refused for school cleaner Vincent Stanford, who was arrested for murdering Leeton school teacher Stephanie Scott just days before her wedding in country New South Wales. The 2UE newsroom had been producing hourly news for over ninety years and there was healthy competition between the two rival newsrooms. The capital city newsroom merger between 2GB and 2UE had been rumoured for years but it was still a shock to those working in the newsrooms when it happened. Both stations now take the same bulletin which comes from 2GB’s Pyrmont studio. So now there was one reporter at ICAC for both stations and she was staying for the morning before heading back to state parliament to cover something else in the afternoon.

  Other regulars in the ICAC media room, such as Seven’s Lee Jeloseck and Nine’s Kevin Wilde, had moved on to other media rounds or to jobs outside the media.

  I overheard Channel Ten ICAC regular Dan Sutton talking to media manager Nicole Thomas.

  ‘I see you’ve upgraded from International Roast to Nescafé Blend 43 these days,’ he said, as he made himself an instant coffee.

  ‘It was on special,’ Nicole replied.

  She was waiting until all the reporters arrived so she could give us the usual media logistics briefing about what we can and can’t do during an ICAC public inquiry. Despite an ICAC restructure, some familiar office staff faces, whom I had seen around but had never spoken to during years of covering ICAC inquiries, came out to say they hoped I was okay after the accident.

  Explaining to two work-experience journalism students who everyone in the media room was, Dan Sutton jokingly said a few of the reporters were ‘ICAC royalty’ because we had been doing our jobs for so long.

  Just before I filed my midday radio story and an online story, he asked, ‘What are you leading with this hour? Someone “accused of rorting taxpayers” or someone “accused of defrauding the state government”?’

  ‘I’ve already used both of those in my 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. radio stories,’ I replied. ‘This hour I’m going with someone “accused of stealing”.’

  The students quickly wrote it all down.

  As witnesses were sworn in we also remarked that they were now being given the option of taking an oath on the Koran as well as the Bible or the usual making of an affirmation.

  The inquiry heard allegations that Eman Sharobeem fraudulently obtained more than $600,000 in New South Wales Government funding when she was in charge of two not-for-profit migrant community health groups in Sydney’s west.

  According to ICAC investigators the fraud took place over a decade until 2016. She was accused of submitting fake invoices and using taxpayer’s money to buy her husband a luxury car and to pay for holidays, dental work, jewellery, clothes and beauty services. The inquiry heard allegations she claimed reimbursement when retailers had refunded money paid and allegations she used government money to pay $34,000 of traffic fines, with $10,000 of that in just one year.

  There were allegations she falsely claimed to have two PhDs in psychology and an MA to boost her public profile, and that she offered counselling services when she was not properly qualified.

  Sharobeem was accused of inflating figures of the number of participants in government-funded programs. In one case she was accused of falsely claiming funding for yoga classes for almost 2,000 women when the ICAC said only twenty took part.

  She was also accused of inflating the numbers for craft and parenting classes and for Swahili women’s groups and of buying a massage chair for a community room with government money. Visitors were allegedly charged $5 to sit in it for fifteen minutes, but staff used it for free.

  Counsel Assisting Ramesh Rajalingham said other furniture such as twelve dining chairs, a washing machine and a treadmill were delivered to a community centre . . . but then mysteriously disappeared. He said Ms Sharobeem used taxpayer money to renovate her $600,000 Fairfield home which she later sold for $1.3 million.

  In her evidence, Eman Sharobeem denied any wrongdoing. She said she had only ever tried to help people and that the ICAC was bullying, terrorising and abusing her.

  When presented with receipts and bank records she responded with, ‘I’ve been framed . . . I want to die.’

  At one point she said a colleague must have ‘framed her’ by submitting expense receipts for leather dining chairs for her home and arranging for the money to be paid into her bank account. Ms Sharobeem said she had left her bag open on her desk and someone might have taken the receipt from the bag without her knowing about it.

  Responding to a question about a document showing thousands of dollars of government money being transferred into her personal account, Ms Sharobeem said, ‘It’s shocking — I can’t believe what I have just seen.’

  When asked about why receipts submitted for reimbursement had been ‘cut in half’ so the provider could not be identified she replied, ‘I was not cutting the receipts . . . I was only reducing the size of them.’5

  There were emotional outbursts when she accused the ICAC of victimising her and at one point the inquiry was adjourned due to concerns about her health.6

  Heading out of the inquiry room one afternoon after doing a live radio cross, I wondered what governance recommendations the ICAC would make after this inquiry. I also felt gratitude to be back on my court
round after my falling-down-stairs battering.

  The ICAC had taken a battering too, with a massive restructure and criticism for overstepping the mark in trying to go after prosecutor Margaret Cunneen.

  But it was still around.

  And so was I.

  9

  Justice on trial

  The murder trial

  In February 2012 Gordon Wood was acquitted of murdering his girlfriend, Caroline Byrne. As one of his sisters said outside the court, his journey with the legal system was a long and eventful one.1

  After being found guilty in 2008, Wood spent just over three years in jail before he walked free and then sued the state of New South Wales for malicious prosecution. His murder trial was about an alleged crime of passion, the victim was a beautiful model and it had a high-profile witness list of Sydney identities.

  Everyone in Sydney wanted to know what had happened to Caroline Byrne.

  Taking me back to the ABC at night after I had reported on the trial all day, taxi drivers would ask me, ‘Did he do it?’

  Gordon Wood was accused of pushing Byrne off The Gap, a notorious suicide spot at Watsons Bay in Sydney’s affluent eastern suburbs. Her body was found at the base of the cliff early on 8 June 1995.

  Wood and Byrne had met at a Sydney gym where he was an instructor and, at the time of her death they were living together. Gordon Wood was also working as a chauffeur and assistant to the late, flamboyant stockbroker Rene Rivkin (who took his own life in May 2005).

  There were two inquests into twenty-four year old Caroline Byrne’s death but no charges were laid and after the second inquest, Gordon Wood went to live in London. He had always maintained Caroline Byrne committed suicide and he even went on television in 1998 to deny having anything to do with her death.2

  Caroline Byrne’s father, Tony, however, refused to believe his daughter killed herself and campaigned hard for the police to keep investigating her death. Gordon Wood was extradited back to Sydney in 2006 and charged with murder.3

  Wood’s first trial started on 21 July 2008 in the sandstone Darlinghurst Courthouse in Taylor Square and was aborted after just four days. The court heard that one of the jurors phoned my former 2GB colleague reporter turned broadcaster, Jason Morrison and told him the jury was planning to go to The Gap to do its own investigation. The woman also told him another juror, who was a bully, had already decided that Gordon Wood was guilty.

  Justice Graham Barr took the unusual step of putting the jurors in the witness box and said one of them was not being entirely truthful and some other jurors were being ‘less than frank’.

  The prosecutor Mark Tedeschi QC said the phone call might have been a prank but Gordon Wood’s defence barrister Winston Terracini SC said the judge could not rule out that it was one of the jurors. So in order to give Gordon Wood a fair trial, Justice Barr had no other option but to discharge the jury and in doing so, noted that there had been no wrongdoing on Jason’s part.4

  Although we had seen all of this play out sensationally in court, a lot of the detail was not able to be reported until the judge lifted his non-publication orders. A new jury of fifteen was empanelled but only twelve jurors chosen by ballot made the final decision on the case. (Legislation introduced to New South Wales in 2007 had given courts the power to select these larger juries in long-running cases.)

  When Gordon Wood’s new trial got underway on 26 August 2008 it went for almost three months with around seventy witnesses called — many of them high-profile Sydney identities. The witness list included businessman and my former 2GB employer John Singleton, former Labor powerbroker Graham Richardson and actor and Bollywood star Tania Zaetta, who had been Caroline Byrne’s friend.

  The rarely used public gallery upstairs balcony in Court 3 of the Darlinghurst Courthouse was opened to seat the large crowds filing in every day and I sat on the floor outside in the foyer with my laptop to file stories each hour.

  On one occasion a court sheriff walked up, kicked my laptop cord out of a power point and barked, ‘You can’t use the electricity in here’. The media were forced to move outside onto the grass.

  The next day there was debate between some of the court staff about whether or not reporters were actually allowed to sit in the foyer at all or to stand on the grass outside to do television pieces to camera. We fired off emails of protest to the court media officers explaining that we needed somewhere to do our jobs and eventually we were allowed to both sit in the foyer and stand on the grass.

  As the story unfolded, Caroline Byrne’s friends alleged that Gordon Wood was a possessive and often jealous boyfriend.

  Tania Zaetta, whom Byrne had met when they were models for the Gordon Charles agency, said Wood phoned Byrne several times a day even though they were living together and it became ‘overbearing’.

  She said Caroline Byrne was like the character Charlotte from the television show Sex and the City because she was prim and proper but ‘not stuck up’.5

  I went back to the newsroom one night after court and heard a group of female reporters talking about Sex and the City and how some of the witnesses in the trial could be written into the series.

  One of the most gracious witnesses I have ever seen in a court was June Dally-Watkins, who employed Caroline Byrne in her deportment and modelling school in sales and training roles and was a great support for Tony Byrne. Ms Dally-Watkins testified that Caroline Byrne was a happy person who loved her job. She said, although she didn’t know Gordon Wood very well, he phoned her after Caroline’s death and told her she was depressed, hated the job and was seeing a psychiatrist.

  June Dally-Watkins said a week after Caroline died, she went with one of the model’s friends, actor Kylie Watson, to The Gap and they showed photos of Caroline to restaurant employees who later remembered seeing a woman who looked like her with two men, either the day she died, or the day before.

  After the perfectly groomed Ms Dally-Watkins finished her evidence, she smiled and acknowledged the jury, the legal teams and the media with a very regal wave of her gloved hand.

  She said, ‘thank you very much’ to everyone twice, which highly amused the jury and the public gallery.6 There was whispering and lots of oohs and ahs.

  ‘She is so elegant,’ said one older woman in the public galley.

  On one occasion during the trial, I was heading towards the exit door to file a story just at the start of the lunch break when I sensed someone behind me grab the door and hold it open. Thinking it was a court sheriff or colleague I turned around to say thank you and there was Gordon Wood, politely holding the door for me. He was on bail during his trial and allowed to come and go from the court. Up close he was much taller than he seemed when he was sitting alone in the dock, the hardest place to be in any court, taking notes each day. He appeared thin and drawn. I looked Gordon Wood in the eye at that moment and simply said, ‘Thank you’.

  The Gordon Wood trial sat one night on 23 September, 2008 to hear evidence via video link from artist John Doherty who lived near The Gap in 1995, but had moved to Ireland. He said the night of Caroline Byrne’s death, he saw a girl and two men arguing and later heard a woman scream.7

  After John Doherty’s evidence, the jury was taken that night by bus to The Gap. Only a couple of reporters followed instead of the usual media pack and the area was cordoned off as officers from the police rescue unit set up strong floodlights. The lights were turned off when the fifteen jurors were led along the top of the cliff in single file carrying torches. Justice Graham Barr, Prosecutor Mark Tedeschi QC and Gordon Wood’s defence barrister Winston Terracini QC were with them.

  Part of the prosecution case was that after he reported her missing, Gordon Wood took members of Caroline Byrne’s family to look for her at The Gap. The jury had been told that despite poor visibility on a very dark night, he seemed to know where her body was and had pointed to it.8

  We were told to keep a suitable distance away from the jury and the other court staff but it was an
almost surreal experience being at The Gap late at night, having heard it referred to over and over in the evidence each day. The only sound we could hear was waves crashing against the rocks below and the water and the night sky were both beautiful.

  As we looked over a railing to the rocks then Telegraph court reporter Lisa Davies said, ‘Poor Caroline.’

  After the evidence wrapped up, the jury took a week to deliberate before finding Gordon Wood guilty.

  Waiting for the jury to reach a verdict during the Gordon Wood murder trial at the Darlinghurst Court Complex in 2008. Photo by Mark Tedeschi QC.

  Waiting for a jury to come back can be frustrating, but the jurors can really take as long as they want. It seems like forever when you are ‘jury watching’ but the only real signal a jury might have made a decision, is a court officer actually unlocking the court door and interested parties such as solicitors and prosecutors turning up at the court and going in. In some big, high-profile cases the court media officers send an email around or text journalists that a verdict has been reached, but this is not always the case and there is a risk you will accidentally get left off the email.

  There’s also always great excitement and anticipation about a verdict in the media pack if the jury asks to give the judge a note, but that’s often just to ask for more information or transcripts of exhibits, or to ask the judge a question.

  When the jurors in the Wood case retired to start their deliberations I sat on the rickety stairs of the court foyer waiting each day for their decision and working on background stories about the case and following up other stories by phone. Some media colleagues came and went, relying on me to text them if there was ‘any movement’ in the court. Other reporters sat with me and got through crossword puzzles and entire novels. Some of the camera crews played cricket on the grass outside.

  On one day of jury watch, a group of reporters were sitting in the sun playing the game ‘Capital Cities of the World’ on someone’s laptop. In this game you are given multiple choice answers from which to choose the correct capital city of a particular country. While the reporters were trying to guess the capital of Greenland, Gordon Wood walked past, heading towards his legal team who were in a meeting room inside the court building.