by Bri Lee
‘Oh cool, why did you go?’ I asked. ‘For that famous gelati place?’
‘No, we visited Samuel’s parents’ new house,’ she went on, licking foamed milk from her spoon as my body started its familiar shutdown ritual. ‘It’s architecturally designed and so lovely. I said to your father, “This is the kind of house I really wanted.”’
‘Mm?’ I picked up my cup and pretended to blow on it to cool it down but I just held it in front of my face as it flushed red. My eyes were going blurry at the edges, as she went on talking and stirring sugar into her flat white.
‘And it’s so nice and green up there! I said to your dad, “Why don’t we just sell and move up here? Everything would be so much easier to grow!”’
‘And why were you there?’ I asked, struggling to sound casual. ‘Did they just call you out of the blue? Or did he invite you? Was he there?’
‘Well, Samuel invited us and I think he thought your brother would be there because he’s got some new investment idea and—’
‘He’s such a fuckwit.’
‘Yes, well, we just told Samuel on the phone that we weren’t in a position to invest, and then he called on the morning of our visit and cancelled. But we still had a lovely day with Samuel’s parents. Did I tell you it’s a kind of hexagon?’
‘What?’
‘Their house, it’s architecturally designed. A hexagon shape. And they have the most amazing kitchen. A brand-new kitchen. Leslie—his mother—told me it cost them over fifty thousand dollars.’
‘That’s a lot.’ My pulse was rising, the pressure behind my eyes building. Every time she’d said his name, the feelings had got worse. ‘What the hell does he want Arron’s money for now?’
‘Oh we didn’t ask. Your brother’s old enough to deal with that himself now. And I didn’t want to spoil the mood.’
I wanted to tell her about Samuel right then and there in that cafe, but it was stuck up in my throat. If she’d just asked me, ‘Why do you hate him so much?’ I might have spilled it all out, but I was too afraid. I told myself it wasn’t the right time and made an excuse to use the bathroom. But when I got home later, I realised there would never be a right time and immediately felt as if I missed Mum. I hadn’t really listened to anything she’d said; she could surely tell I was distracted or that I didn’t want to be there. She probably thought I didn’t want to see her so much—and that was true, but only because whenever I saw her I spent the entire time trying to tell her what had happened to me and fighting through The Freeze again.
That night, home alone, the guilt became too much. The only meals I’d eaten in the few days beforehand were dinners that I had vomited straight back up, and I reflected on that achievement being my single source of personal pride. But it also meant that my body wasn’t behaving normally. I sat outside with my cigarettes, a glass of ice, and a bottle of Jameson, looking up at the stars. I already felt an unbearable surge of regret for how rude I’d been to the mother who just wanted to spend time with me, and when the alcohol and nicotine hit together I slid down in my chair, my head lolling to the side.
‘Do you want me to pay for coffee?’ I’d offered, trying to use my new money to say what I couldn’t, and the look on her face pained me. But I also felt so mad at her. How little she must think of me, to presume that I simply couldn’t be bothered to be kind. Why couldn’t she tell what was wrong?
A mosquito landed on my forearm and I watched it twitch, trying to tell if I could feel it there, but I couldn’t, and it sat there drinking until I used the arm to lift the bottle to my lips again. I drank two more huge mouthfuls in quick succession, dribbling onto my shirt after the second, and knocked the bottle against my forehead. Was all of the wretchedness trapped up in there? I smacked my head with my other hand, then hit my fist hard against my chest. Was the ugliness in my heart? How do I give them what they want? I don’t know how to be this girl. Only skinny enough when starving, only successful enough when exhausted. My legs were itchy from mosquito bites and I scratched up and down them, scraping faster and harder, breathing in quickly with my head between my legs, and then I took another drink, stood up quickly, and caught my reflection in a window. So big. So ugly. So fucking stupid. Such a shit daughter.
Something was coming, a feeling was on the way. I took the bottle inside and found my phone, scrolling messily through the numbers. I couldn’t let my parents know I wasn’t grateful for my life. I didn’t want Vincent to think I was some melodramatic chick. And if I really wanted to die why would I call either of my best mates? I didn’t want to talk to them. I didn’t want anyone to make me want to be alive again. I just wanted to rest. To know that nobody would ever look at me again. To not have to be so embarrassed of myself in front of everyone all the time.
I thumped through the house and pushed open the door to my dark bedroom and looked up at where I knew the ceiling fan was, waiting for my eyes to adjust. Would I do it with the lights on or off? Off, surely, so that I didn’t accidentally see my reflection again. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, put the bottle on my desk and went to my cupboards, looking for something to use, and became frightened. It had to be done, but I was scared. The thought of waking up the next day wasn’t an option. Having to get out of bed and talk to people, inevitably disappointing them, my pimply face and fat body, my idiocy and crude behaviour like a flashing billboard. It was all unbearable. The pity in their eyes, the hurt in my mother’s—I couldn’t do that. But what if it hurt? What if I got it wrong, and I didn’t die, and it made everything worse because then I’d be even more of a disappointment? Take up more of their time and cost them lots of money? Be so lame and stupid that I couldn’t even get this thing right?
I scrambled back to the bedside table, found an old pair of nail scissors, and took a deep breath out before peeling back the bandaids and taking to my thigh again. The blood rose to the surface, the lines laid out like a red tally, but the release didn’t come. The panic was still inside me. I looked up at the ceiling fan, my eyes having adjusted so I could see it swirling slowly on its lowest setting, as though waving to me.
I pushed off the bed. ‘What do I do!?’ I cried out into the wardrobe, grabbing coats and dresses, screaming into the fabrics. ‘I’m so scared!’
My hand closed on a thin piece of leather—a belt—and the shock of it hit me and I fell to the floor. Please, no. I thought to myself, and I imagined my body hanging from the fan for several days, what it might look like by the time my mum came looking for me. I thought of her seeing it there, and I heard how she would scream, I knew how she would hug the corpse even if it was decomposing, how my dad would have to pull her away. And then there, on the floor, I wailed. I couldn’t do that to them. I couldn’t just tap out.
It was going to be so much harder to tell them all, to start dealing with it, but I had to, and I was so tired just thinking of it that I laid my head on some clothes I’d knocked down and cried.
I woke up there, on the floor, the next morning. My daily 7 a.m. phone alarm was going off where I’d left it out near the kitchen. I looked down at the belt on the ground and felt disappointed. There was dried blood all over my hands. The room was a mess, but the ceiling fan still turned and I was still there. Hungover, and late for work, but alive.
WHEN A WOMAN COMPLAINS OF mistreatment by a man, it’s pretty common to hear her referred to as a ‘crazy bitch’. The label is often articulated explicitly by the accused and his supporters, but more insidiously it’s the subtext of news stories and plot lines. Loose cannons with daddy issues, nymphos who just need a good fuck, narcissists and attention-seekers, all out to wreak havoc in cheap pumps. When I hear the stories and see the tropes, I now have a name—Jessica—and a face and a voice for her. The case was R v Phillips, a rape trial that began like most others but rapidly revealed itself to represent everything wrong with the wretched system.
I got suspicious when I flipped through the file on my way to chambers and realised that this was to be the sec
ond time the trial would be run in full. On the first occasion, over six months prior, the jury couldn’t reach a verdict. I turned to the depositions. There had been a pre-trial hearing where defence fought to keep something out of court but failed. What was that something? I searched again. A confession! And some discussion about Phillips’s departure from Queensland! My heart leapt but was then caught. What could possibly have happened in that courtroom, that a man who’d fled interstate and then confessed wasn’t found guilty?
Phillips had a really square head and pale hair that was shorn back into a barely visible buzz cut. He was tall, with the strong shoulders of a labourer, and wore a pale blue business shirt already rolled up at the sleeves. I thought I noticed horizontal creases across it—sometimes the male defendants wore shirts straight out of packets. As I set up court in the morning I saw the defence solicitor, a woman, smiling at him and having a light conversation. She was a beautiful woman in her thirties, and I noticed her long, manicured nails as she poured a glass of water and handed it to him. The barrister, a man, caught me looking and I smiled, wiping the cynicism off my face. Everyone deserves the right to a fair trial, sure, but I knew I couldn’t exchange pleasantries with a man who refused to plead guilty for a rape he’d previously confessed to committing. Phillips had been out on bail since the last mistrial. I imagined all the people he’d met in the preceding six months—between the old trial and this one—and wondered if he’d slept with anyone. How many coffees had he ordered? Did he live in my suburb or get the same train as me like Mr Baker?
I sat down at my computer in court and tried to find statistics for how many people were on bail at any given time in Australia. Then I stumbled onto other research about public misconceptions of recidivism in sex offenders. Contrary to the ghoulish portraits we’re painted, the majority of rapists aren’t actually repeat offenders; they’re not afflicted with an uncontrollable lust. Mostly they’re regular men, with otherwise regular sexual preferences, who see an opportunity and take it. I stood up from my desk, feeling uneasy.
Prosecution had arrived during my internal monologue and I recognised Eric’s face from Gladstone. He looked tired, and I smiled at him realising he was probably thinking the same thing about me.
‘Everyone ready for his Honour?’ I asked aloud to the courtroom, and everyone replied ‘yes’, nodding respectfully. I turned on my heel to go get Judge, my robes billowing behind me.
On the elevator up to chambers I thought about how Tinder and other dating apps had only been developed after Vincent and I got together seriously. I’d never been on a date with someone I didn’t have at least two dozen mutual friends with. If I was single and working in the District Court, would I be too afraid to enjoy casual sex? I thought about going back to a man’s room, and in my mind I saw all the crime-scene photos from the year so far: the lounge rooms and the bedrooms with mismatched sheets, couch pillows strewn around carpets overdue for a vacuum. Dirty dishes on bedside tables. Nobody starts a date night presuming that their home will appear in crime scene photos.
Bing! The elevator doors opened, interrupting my thoughts, and Judge was standing there waiting for me. ‘That looks like some serious thinking,’ he said, stepping in.
‘Nah, not me,’ I said, putting on another smile, ‘not serious and certainly never thinking.’
He laughed and then we got to work. I pulled twelve names out of the barrel. One woman excused herself: same reason as always. I pulled out another name. Judge welcomed the jury, and I finished my preliminary trial paperwork. It was all standard fare until Eric got up to deliver the prosecution’s opening remarks.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, you will see for yourselves shortly, that the complainant in this matter, Jessica, has a somewhat nervous disposition,’ he began, and I felt the room collectively raise their eyebrows. Eric said that defence would try to argue that Jessica’s temperament made her an unreliable witness. That she would be changing her story and changing her mind. ‘But the prosecution case is quite clear,’ he said firmly. ‘Jessica went to sleep, and when she woke up the defendant’s penis was inside her vagina. She was confused for a minute or two, as she woke up, and then she immediately raised the alarm. The defendant, Mr Phillips, left in a hurry—and he didn’t just leave the building, he left the state.’
It was in New South Wales a few weeks later that Phillips said to a counsellor—whom he thought would be held to laws of confidentiality, but was not—that he had raped a woman in South Brisbane.
‘The prosecution’s case is that there is enough evidence here that you can be convinced, beyond reasonable doubt, that the defendant knew Jessica didn’t consent to intercourse, and that far from Jessica’s personality casting doubt on this, the defendant saw her as an easy target and took an opportunity to offend against such a woman.’
Eric’s opening address went for nearly two hours and there was a merciful morning tea-break afterwards. Judge and I went back up in the elevator together.
‘She must be pretty bad,’ I said to him sadly, ‘for a jury to have doubted her evidence so much that it overcame a confession.’
‘Mm,’ he took his glasses off, rubbed the bridge of his nose, and put them back on, ‘we’ll find out soon enough.’
Back up on level thirteen in the short break, I walked past a group of associates chatting about their jobs and plans for the following year. Who was going to which big firm, who was going to the DPP, who was moving overseas for a coveted secondment. I pretended to be too busy to join them then sat in my office doing more searching online. Why don’t people believe women? Why do people think women are liars?
The most convincing research came from medicine, where a woman’s self-reported pain was routinely questioned where a man’s was not. Women received significantly lower dosages of painkillers to men, even after accounting for variance in body mass. Endometriosis affects the same number of people as diabetes but gets about a tenth of the funding. The disease is woefully misunderstood because it relies on women complaining of extreme period pain, and for the vast majority of Western medicine’s history, doctors and researchers either didn’t believe women or just didn’t give a shit about them.
The Queensland benchbook has a section on ‘lies’. It says, ‘Bear in mind this warning: The mere fact that the defendant tells a lie is not in itself evidence of guilt.’ I wondered if we had better evidence of the epidemic of disbelief in women, the jury could be warned of it: ‘Bear in mind this warning: There is a strong statistical probability that you will presume this woman is a liar. Be aware of the subconscious bias, and do not let it affect the duty you have to weigh evidence evenly.’ False accusations of sexual assault are notoriously difficult to define and gather for statistical significance, but anecdotally they’re witch hunts. There are so many gatekeepers and decision-makers for matters being dropped or proceeding, but the percentage of false rape accusations is pretty widely agreed upon within the profession as sitting in the low single digits—the same rate that people are falsely accused of other serious crimes.
The benchbook also has a section called ‘distressed condition’ that tells judges what to say to juries when they hear evidence of a complainant being distressed after a sexual assault or rape:
It is a matter for you as the sole judges of the facts whether you accept the evidence relating to the complainant’s distressed condition. If you do, then you have to ask yourself: was the distressed condition genuine or was the complainant pretending? Was he or she putting on the condition of distress? Was there any other explanation for the distressed condition at the time? It is customary for judges to warn juries that you ought to attach little weight to distressed condition because it can be easily pretended.
Judges tell juries: if a defendant lies, it doesn’t necessarily mean he’s guilty, but if a woman is crying as she dials triple zero after being raped, she might just be putting on a show.
Jessica spoke in staccatos, stuttering and pausing even as she repeated after the bailiff, sw
earing to tell the truth. ‘The three of us. Rolled some. Ah. Cigarettes. You know. Together,’ she said, her eyes darting to each side as the prosecutor slowly stepped her through the events of the evening. Jessica had long, dark, wavy hair that frizzed out at the ends, and a purple lace blouse with sleeves that went past her tiny wrists. She had been in the witness stand for about five minutes before she started tugging on them and fidgeting.
‘If you need a break, or want to slow things down, please just let me know,’ Eric said to her as we all noticed her nerves.
‘Nah. Yeah. It’s alright. Sorry. This is just, like, the most public speaking I’ve ever had to do. In front of all you.’
It was a punch in the gut. My mother had enrolled me in speech and drama classes from primary school, and I was a debater for seven years. At university I performed comedy acts for thousands and I sometimes got invited to talk at events. Most of the people I grew up with wouldn’t even consider giving testimony in court ‘public speaking’, we were so used to tabling our thoughts and having our opinions listened to. But here was Jessica receiving the most attention she’d ever had, in her whole life, all eyes on her, as she told people how she was raped.
‘I remember he was above me. And. Because. He was supporting all his weight on his arms. Like, above me. So that he wasn’t touching me or bumping me, you know. Apart from down there.’
The events of the evening took place in Jessica’s ex-boyfriend’s unit, just across the hall from her own. Her ex-boyfriend and Phillips had met that week on a job site, and Jessica had been invited over to join them for a drink. Jessica said that when she first woke up she didn’t scream right away because she thought the man on top of her, inside her, was her ex-boyfriend, but that as she fully came around she realised that his figure was different, the silhouette of his hair didn’t match her ex-boyfriend’s, and that it was in fact Phillips. The prosecutor had to paint her early minutes of confusion as reasonable—that as she was coming round she might have thought he was just her ex-boyfriend—but I wanted to get up and point out that commencing intercourse with a sleeping woman is rape regardless of the pair’s history. Yet another level of heartbreak: Jessica would not have been surprised, would not have raised an alarm, if her ex-boyfriend had entered her while she was unconscious.
