Court Reporter

by Jamelle Wells

  It listed some case studies of other persons and families subjected to security threats after increased media reporting, such as the Beckhams, singer Joss Stone, David Letterman, the Pulver family and Australian heart surgeon Victor Chang.

  Justice Ball said he accepted that Gina Rinehart and her family were in the public eye and that a lot was being written about the trust feud, but he didn’t see how any further media reporting on it was going to heighten the security risk.4

  My stories on the case were in the ABC radio bulletins that night, the Perth television news and an online story. The next morning I was back in the studio for ABC News Breakfast and Radio National’s AM program.

  More documents released after a March court ruling in the case, revealed Gina Rinehart had told three of her children in an email that they could be bankrupted and face a huge capital gains tax liability unless they agreed to let her retain control of a family trust. That was the day the family members started releasing public statements about each other.

  Reading the radio news for ABC Sydney and Radio National in 2014. Photo by Kylie Simmonds.

  A statement issued on behalf of Gina Rinehart by her solicitor Paul McCann said her children had all enjoyed ‘very privileged lives’ because of their mother’s wealth.

  ‘The plaintiff children have seen fit not to follow sound advice from family friends that if they are not happy, they should go out and earn for themselves,’ the statement said. ‘Mrs Rinehart and her daughter Ginia are extremely disappointed that three of her children have adopted a course of making public a private matter and jeopardising family security, including that of young, dependent and innocent children and can only conclude that they have done so in an attempt to apply public pressure through the media.’

  Ginia, who had sided with her mother from the start, also released a statement. ‘My siblings and I were blessed with an exceptionally fortunate upbringing. This case is motivated entirely by greed and I have no doubt that one day soon my brother and sisters will regret putting money before family. Unfortunately, this realisation will come too late as the damage to our family and its good reputation will already have been done. It is very painful to have my family’s disagreement argued so publically.’5

  I did many crosses about this case with the late Mark Colvin when he was hosting Radio National’s PM program in 2012.

  ‘All these allegations of deception and fraud could be very serious for somebody who is clearly on the board of a lot of companies,’ he said. ‘Pandora’s box is open . . .’6

  After the matter finally got into open court, Gina Rinehart released another statement about her children.

  ‘I have always worked in the best interests of our family company and my record shows I have turned Hancock Prospecting into one of the most successful private companies in the country, which is of benefit to all my children, given their interest via the trust I requested be set up for them,’ the statement said, ‘Hard work, sacrifice and immense dedication, not short-term gambles in hope of quick easy money, has got us here with the help of a dedicated but very small executive team.

  ‘This has become a company this family should be genuinely very proud of, as my daughter Ginia is, not attacked or distracted for selfish reasons in public litigation.’7

  On 28 May 2015 Justice Paul Brereton ruled that Bianca Rinehart should take over the trust, he said that Gina Rinehart had gone to ‘extraordinary lengths’ and used ‘enormous pressure’ to try to keep control of it directly or indirectly. He said the efforts included trying to get the support of National Party politician and Federal Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce and family friend and former Olympic swimmer Grant Hackett.

  Justice Brereton also ordered Gina Rinehart to produce documents relating to the trust that Bianca and John had claimed were kept from them.8

  Although the issue of a new trustee has been resolved, there are separate cases related to the trust before the courts as we go to print. Gina Rinehart has denied any wrongdoing.9

  Robert Hughes

  When former Hey Dad! television star Robert Hughes faced a District Court trial for child sex offences in 2014, a man who wouldn’t identify himself stood out the front of the Downing Centre for four hours one day during the first week of the trial spitting into a cup. He told reporters that when the cup was full of saliva he was going to throw it over Hughes later that afternoon. The man, who didn’t seem to have a connection to the case, seemed very angry. Reporters told the court sheriffs about him so he was escorted away from the building to avoid any trouble.

  This trial attracted an extraordinary amount of attention from the start — not only from adults but also from large school excursion groups who would file into the public gallery sometimes during graphic and sensitive evidence. The trial was in one of the lower-ground courts where there are no windows and no natural light.

  Robert Hughes was on bail, which meant he came and went from the court each day and during lunch breaks. He stood trial for eleven sexual and indecent assault charges involving five victims aged under sixteen and dating back to the 1980s.

  The retired actor had played Martin Kelly, an architect and widowed father of three in the television series from 1987 to 1993. He was extradited back from London and aged sixty-five at the time of his trial that started in early 2014 and ran for almost six weeks.

  During the trial, the court heard evidence, not only from his victims, but also from other women about sexual misconduct allegations for which he did not stand trial, but that suggested a pattern of predatory behaviour he had engaged in for twenty years.

  One witness, who was a cast member of Hey Dad! as a child, said Robert Hughes had exposed himself to her in the Channel Seven studio and groped her. She could have given her evidence via video link but chose to confront him in court which was a brave move. The woman told the court nothing was done when she complained to adults about his strange behaviour.

  ‘I was basically told as a child to sit down and shut up,’ she said.10

  Another witness said when she first met Hughes she recognised him from the 1977 film ABBA: The Movie which was about the group’s Australian tour in which he played a reporter. The witness said he knew her family through his work in a voice-over studio. She described how in the 1980s Robert Hughes came into her bedroom during a dinner party in her family home and when she woke up his hand was down her pants and she didn’t know what to do.

  She told the court, ‘I just closed my eyes.’

  The woman said she was scared and shocked and later refused to go on a family holiday because she knew he would be there.11

  The court heard one woman was nine when Robert Hughes told her to swim between his legs at Manly Beach when his swimmers were pulled down and another woman was seven when he put her hand on his genitals.12

  A witness giving evidence via video link said he crept into her bedroom and inappropriately touched her when she was a child sleeping over at his Sydney north shore home. She said on one occasion, after forcing her to put her hand on his genitals, he told her to go back to sleep and gave her a Teddy Bear. The witness told her parents when she was aged around seven and they sent her to a psychologist and soon after that sold their house and moved.13

  Witnesses at Robert Hughes’ trial included his well-known talent agent wife Robyn Gardiner and his daughter. They both defended him and said they saw no evidence to prove any of the allegations.

  Robert Hughes was in the witness box for three days and denied all eleven charges of sexually or indecently assaulting five girls between 1985 and 1990.14

  His defence lawyer Greg Walsh had argued that everybody knew Robert Hughes when he was in Hey Dad! and that he was very popular. Mr Walsh said his client had been subjected to years of constant publicity and was a victim of rumour and innuendo because of his fame. The defence lawyer told the jury that some of the women giving evidence against Robert Hughes had been paid for commercial television and women’s magazine interviews.15

  The d
ay Robert Hughes was found guilty of nine charges, he shook his head, then stood up defiantly in the dock and yelled out, ‘I am innocent’.

  The jurors in his trial had worked hard delivering their verdict over two days.

  They found him guilty of nine charges on a Monday but they couldn’t decide on another two charges, so the judge let them go home and then return to reconsider the remaining two charges the next morning.16

  There had been so much media attention given to this case, that on the Tuesday, Robert Hughes’ lawyer applied to discharge the jury before it decided on the final two charges because of all the publicity surrounding the case.

  Lawyer Greg Walsh argued that there was no way the jurors would not have heard or seen the publicity after their Monday decision. But Prosecutor Gina O’Rourke argued that the media stories were about information the jury had already heard in court during Robert Hughes’ trial and District Court Judge Peter Zahra dismissed the application.

  Robert Hughes was then found guilty of one of the remaining two charges, but the jury was unable to reach a verdict on a final charge of committing an indecent act with a child under sixteen.17

  During sentencing submissions, the women whom Robert Hughes abused when they were children gave disturbing accounts of how the abuse continued to affect them as adults. In a victim impact statement read in court by a police officer, one woman described how she spent years feeling worthless and suffering from an eating disorder since being assaulted at Manly Beach when she was just nine years old. She said she wore loose clothes all the time as an adult so that no one would look at her.

  In the statement the woman said:

  ‘Throughout the years when I heard your voice on a TV commercial or the first few bars of the Hey Dad! theme I turned the TV down and walked out of the room. I hope the punishment fits the crime and you will have to suffer for years to come, just like I have . . . I wish you nothing but misery.’

  In another statement a victim said she had grown up to hate the word, ‘Dad’.

  ‘I will never have children because of Robert. I never want to risk having a kid going through what I did,’ she said.

  Another victim, who was sexually assaulted in her own home, wrote in her statement: ‘I used to think I was a nervous teenager . . . not being able to breathe was very normal to me . . . not feeling safe at someone’s house.

  ‘I have learned my feelings are normal for someone who has been abused, not for someone who has not,’ she said.

  Crown prosecutor Gina O’Rourke asked the judge to take the young age of the victims into account.18

  The day Robert Hughes was sentenced, the public gallery was so full the doors were closed by the court sheriffs due to safety concerns.

  I knew that there would be anger among some of his victims if his sentence was perceived as too light; which it was by some members of the public, especially on Twitter. But Judge Peter Zahra noted that the sentence he could give was bound by legislation from the time of the offences in the 1980s and 1990s and that now non-parole periods for offenders are longer.

  The judge described Robert Hughes’ actions as being predatory and said he took advantage of opportunities with children.

  ‘The offender does not express remorse and there is no evidence that the offender remained troubled by his conduct,’ he said.

  The judge noted that as time passed, Hughes would have become confident that his victims would remain silent.

  ‘The victims here remain deeply disturbed by the conduct of the offender,’ he said.19

  Robert Hughes sat quietly with his back to the crowded public gallery as the minimum six-year sentence was handed down. Outside court, his lawyer Greg Walsh told reporters that Robert Hughes health was deteriorating in jail.

  ‘Jail isn’t a pleasant place . . . as I said to the learned sentencing judge, every day of his sentence he’ll have to look over his shoulder,’ Mr Walsh said outside court. ‘I asked for him to be placed on strict non-association and they wouldn’t listen to me, so he is now exposed to other prisoners and he’s threatened on a daily basis.

  ‘It’s very difficult for someone like him, with the media notoriety, to serve his sentence.’20

  The former actor later lost appeals against his conviction and sentence in both the New South Wales Court of Criminal Appeal and in the High Court.

  He will be eligible for parole in 2020.

  20

  How much detail?

  IN MARCH 2017 I was asked to take part in an internal ABC conversation that followed a rape victim dropping her case against her attackers because of media coverage.

  The sixteen year old girl had accused three brothers of raping her in a country town when she was just fourteen. They were committed to stand trial but the case was dropped after details of the alleged rape were reported. The girl’s family told the media that reports on the details of the rape had been so distressing and harrowing for her that she couldn’t go to school. Her parents said they feared she would be ‘brutalised’ and ‘traumatised’ further in the witness box during cross examination by the defence, even though she could have given evidence by video link.

  When I heard about the case being dropped, it made me think of many victims of sexual assault who drop charges or don’t pursue them in the first place for that very reason.

  Although prosecutors warn victims it will be tough in the witness box and there are protections in place for them such as giving evidence via video link, it’s not uncommon for victims to pull out at the last minute.

  In a small town, even though the girl’s name was not published, some students at her school would have known about the case and who it involved and it would have been hard for her to face her peers.

  With my court reporter colleagues from other states and some of our editors, we discussed judging the public interest in cases that contained graphic detail and whether or not we should be reporting all that detail.

  From a court reporter’s point of view, the facts need to be stated in the interest of accuracy and balance, but just how much do we need to filter to protect our audience? Sometimes a graphic-content warning is needed ahead of a court story, and setting the boundaries of what really needs to be reported for public interest and what is simply gratuitous is a daily consideration. Some victims of horrific crime give permission for things to be reported because they think it will assist other victims or help expose the true character of the offender.

  If we don’t report what a convicted criminal has done or if we dumb it down too much, are we guilty of somehow letting them off the hook in the public eye? Shouldn’t at least some of what they’ve done be revealed?

  While some media outlets often start out being conservative in their reporting of a criminal matter, by the end of the day, if it’s been reported everywhere else, they end up following suit.

  ABC broadcaster and former foreign correspondent Linda Mottram, who does editorial standards training with reporters, says although a high level of journalistic skill is needed to be a court reporter, it’s an isolated existence and if you lose sight of the humanity around you, it becomes hard to make judgments of taste.

  ‘It’s a tough balancing act between reporting the facts and minimising the risks and difficulties for an audience watching or reading or listening,’ she says. ‘It’s something we should talk about so that reporters know they are not on their own.’

  Linda remembers being a young newspaper reporter in Perth and being sent to cover courts and thinking, Oh my God what sort of world am I in?

  ‘It was a theatrical and rarefied atmosphere that at first felt beyond my emotional capacity to cope with,’ she says. ‘The people I dealt with ranged from pompous barristers who didn’t have time for a young reporter to judge’s associates who empathised. There was always a sense of second guessing yourself and asking, is the story important enough to cover?’

  When she first started reporting on courts, Linda Mottram says she sat in a court one day listening to a po
lice officer giving evidence and she knew he was lying because of some work she had already done on a case.

  ‘It’s the first time I’d heard a police officer in uniform lying and I was shocked,’ she says. ‘The magistrate raised an eyebrow and the case didn’t go the way police wanted it to. The fact that an officer would lie on oath showed me, as a young reporter, a dark side of the law.’1

  Graeme Reeves

  The consideration of how far do we go when reporting the gruesome details of court cases, came into question during the trials I covered for former gynaecologist and obstetrician Graeme Reeves, who was facing a string of charges for horrific crimes against his female patients.

  Reeves had been struck off by the New South Wales Medical Board for gross misconduct and first started to get media attention in 2008. He was charged with offences including aggravated sexual assault and indecent assault during medical examinations, female genital mutilation and maliciously and inflicting grievous bodily harm.

  The former doctor pleaded guilty to Medicare fraud offences and at a trial before a judge without a jury for indecently assaulting female patients was found guilty of two of five charges.

  The first of his trials that went before a jury that I covered, was for female genital mutilation and inflicting grievous bodily harm on Caroline DeWaegeneire, a brave woman who gave permission for the media to report her name and details of her case.

  That trial ended in a hung jury, which did not surprise me, because to me, the jury did not look to be working as a team. Some jurors sat with their backs turned to others and there was a sense of tension between them.

  At Graeme Reeves’ second trial in 2011, another jury found him guilty of maliciously inflicting grievous bodily harm by removing Caroline DeWageneire’s clitoris without her consent during a routine operation in 2002.

  She testified that she thought she was going to have surgery to have a pre-cancerous lesion removed from her labia and did not give consent for anything else.