by Bri Lee
‘This will be our shortest ever,’ I said to Judge back in chambers.
‘Yes,’ he replied, interested. ‘What do you think?’
‘Oh, you know me,’ I said, waving a hand in front of my face, ‘I think they’re all guilty.’
After about three hours the bailiff found me, and we all went back in. I watched George in the seat at the back of the courtroom with his wife.
‘And do you find the defendant guilty or not guilty?’ I asked the speaker.
‘Guilty.’
In my peripheral vision I saw George hang his head. His wife squeezed his hand then leaned over to kiss his cheek, looking upward to keep her mascara from running, dabbing a tissue under her eyes. He rested his head on her shoulder, and she put her chin against his forehead, holding his cheek with her other hand.
When I sat down, having taken all four verdicts for each offence, Judge announced that we’d move straight to sentence. The prosecutor advised the court that George had prepared a victim impact statement, and that he would read it aloud himself. I stopped what I was doing and looked up, confused. Victims were entitled to write and present statements to the sentencing judge. There were fuzzy rules about how victim impact statements weren’t supposed to affect sentencing too severely, but the statements were widely agreed upon to be an important opportunity for the victim to feel that their voice and perspective were being heard in their otherwise powerless situation within the system. The thing was, complainants normally typed the statements up and tendered them as documents. We had always just paused during sentencing proceedings to allow Judge time to read a victim impact statement, and then counsel would continue with their submissions as to comparable sentences. So while I’d read a few, I’d never heard any out loud.
George returned to the witness box and held a single A4 page, folded in half, and I saw it shaking. He remained standing and started to read, slowly and clearly. He began with a little bit about how happy and normal his life had been, then spoke of how confused and sad he’d become when Delaware started molesting him, and the struggles he’d faced having moved away from home so young. It had been difficult for him to get a decent job so he’d moved from town to town, leaving friends and security behind, falling in with ‘rough crowds’. As he aged and started relationships with women he struggled with intimacy and expressing his sexuality, second-guessing his feelings and pushing away people who cared about him.
When George said that he blamed Delaware for ruining his relationship with his mother, the piece of paper trembled more, and George’s voice broke. ‘I don’t see her or talk to her anymore,’ he said, wiping tears off his face, ‘and I miss her.’
He took a deep breath and stepped his hands down the page for the final section: having to deal with what had happened. He accused Delaware of dragging out the court process and refusing to acknowledge or take responsibility for his actions.
‘I’m just so grateful to be able to put this behind me now. I have a loving and supportive family, and now I have closure. I ran from this for years, but now I can finally move on from my past properly.’ George folded the paper back in half, thanked Judge for his time, and walked toward his wife, and when he reached her he fell into her arms, crying, and they cried together, rocking a little, while the sentence proceeded.
I felt the shift immediately. The realisation was a physical sensation, at first an optimism and wonder, a pure hopefulness, like new breath in my chest, and then it quickly grew hard and firm into resolve, dropping into my stomach. I watched George cry—a manifestation of absolute relief—and I knew that was what I wanted. I longed for those tears, I was sure I would know how they felt, I could imagine them for myself. He had spoken about carrying the burden of his abuse for years unnecessarily, and how afraid and full of shame he had felt to tell people about it, but he’d said it was all ‘worth it’ now it was done. His wife was there with him, she didn’t flinch or pull away from him; she moved toward him, held him, cried with him. They did it together. George had nothing but his own memories, and he had taken his abuser to court, and he had won justice. For thirty years he’d carried it around, and in one day, that single Monday, he’d finished it properly. It was over. He would walk out of court and into the rest of his life. He’d used the word ‘lighter’. I wanted ‘lighter’. I wanted to be able to let it go, to move on.
I stopped documenting the sentence and started scribbling in my personal notebook fast. I would tell Vincent about Samuel, and I would tell my parents about Samuel, and then I would tell the police about Samuel. I would take him to court if necessary. I would make a statement and I would risk a trial for the chance to feel what George was feeling right there in front of me. Finally I knew what the brightness at the end of the tunnel might look like, and I would do whatever it took to make it out the other side.
BACK IN BRISBANE THE FOLLOWING week, I rode the elevator down to the courtroom alone. I couldn’t stop thinking about George and his ‘lightness’. It wasn’t a coincidence that the only trial I’d seen without a single bit of corroborating evidence, from over three decades ago, had a male complainant, and the defendant got a guilty verdict. By hours and minutes it was the shortest trial we would do all year. With hindsight, I genuinely believe that a woman saying the exact same words might not have been able to secure a conviction. The police and DPP might not have even proceeded with her allegations. After all, why would a man lie about something like that? What did he have to gain? But a woman, well, you never know what they’re up to.
The elevator opened and I stepped out, and as I rounded the corner the waiting space outside the courtrooms opened up in front of me, crowded with people. Some were in robes, many were managing trolleys and boxes of folders. They were all chatting loudly in groups or yelling into mobile phones. My heels clipped the floor as I crossed the space, and one by one the figures turned toward me and fell silent. I spotted two silks holding their wigs in their hands who had been whispering but now stood still. I was easily the youngest present, but nobody kicks one of the Queen’s corgis. I walked with the adopted weight and respect of my judge, and it felt good. I had significance. People listened when I spoke; I wasn’t interrupted or doubted, because the words were his.
That morning I realised how much I would miss those robes. How I would spend the rest of my life fighting for the respect people showed me when I wore them. It was like a superpower—a rich old white man suit that gave me the superpower of privilege.
I thought a lot about clothes in court, and about grooming and presentation, and how much we underestimate our own biases. It’s about money and priorities and the way we were raised—all the kinds of things that get magnified in court. When people wake up and get dressed on their regular Tuesday mornings, they don’t usually think they’ll have to identify themselves repeatedly in CCTV footage years later, or justify their sartorial decisions to a room of strangers searching desperately for meaning. Solicitors try to dress their clients for court because they understand that juries look for shortcuts to categorise and judge both the complainant and defendant. A grey hoodie pulled over a buzz cut has meaning. Smart black slacks and comfortable old ballet flats have meaning. Tattoos and piercings have meaning.
Sometimes people get confused when they try to interpret the meaning of a woman in a minidress. Does a woman’s attire mean something? Of course it does. Does it have anything to do with her right to go about her day presuming that she won’t be the victim of a violent crime? Nope.
My associate’s robes were easily my favourite outfit of all time. I bought them from my predecessor, Rebecca, who bought them from an associate before her, who bought them from someone else. They had a pedigree, had absorbed meaning from their previous owners. When I wore them I didn’t get nervous about my weight because they hid my figure and I didn’t need to show my figure when I wore them anyway because they highlighted my best asset: my brain. I could be in a hurry and it just looked as if I had important places to be. I could stare off into the
distance, out one of the big glass windows that overlooked the city, and be thinking about getting a kebab for lunch, and it looked as though I was having an internal monologue about justice and humanity. It was helpful to remember that when having to deal with barristers. Just because they were in a robe and wig didn’t mean they were beyond reproach, or weren’t just plain stupid.
I was pretty fed up with barristers by the time we got to The Chickpeas Case that morning. There was one regular barrister on either side of the bar table, plus one Senior Counsel and one Queen’s Counsel, and they all had their different jabots on their necks. The strutting cocks need their plumage, my notes say. A total of seven instructing solicitors and assistants bustled around, and the rows of seats at the back of the room were full of journalists.
A businessman had tried to save money by skipping Australia’s strict fumigation requirements for imports and been caught. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential fines were on the line for both him individually and the company. It didn’t seem terribly important considering we’d heard Pullman’s case on the same level of the building earlier in the year and not a single reporter showed up to hear about a child being repeatedly, violently raped. But chickpeas!? Holy shit! Why didn’t you tell me! Someone call The Courier!
One of the silks approached my table and a silk from the other side noticed, and left a conversation to join us.
The first one addressed me. ‘Good morning, Madame Associate. The situation at present is that if we could have a few more minutes before court starts, we might be able to save a lot of time overall.’
I looked at the other silk, who nodded.
Judge gave a bittersweet smile when I relayed their message to him up in chambers. He’d been prepping for this trial for days despite having a pretty keen suspicion it would settle. Everyone knew how expensive it would be to run the trial with all those counsel.
When we resumed court, I had to arraign the corporation and a legal representative of the corporation had to enter a plea. It was absurd and I was getting tetchy.
On my lunchbreak I met up with Dad. ‘Why do the men at that table get paid so much more than the ones trying to put child rapists in gaol!?’ I pleaded to him, trying to keep my voice down. ‘Did I tell you it was about chickpeas?’
‘Yes—’
‘Chickpeas!’
‘Yes,’ he said slowly, smiling a little.
‘Can you imagine how much money the government would have to pay to put silks on all the rape trials?’
Dad just nodded and we fell into silence for a moment before a terrifying thought occurred to me. What if my matter went to trial and I got one of the shit prosecutors? What if Samuel hired a silk? My thoughts were interrupted with a reminder text message about a psychologist appointment I’d booked for the next day, and when I looked back up to Dad’s face I thought I might cry. I was planning to go to the appointment after work, then have dinner with my parents and tell them about Samuel.
I told Dad I had to get back to work and left early. Being there without telling him felt duplicitous.
Back up in chambers I asked Judge the same question I’d asked my dad, hoping to get a different answer. ‘Why do chickpeas get silks when the twelve-year-old girl Pullman raped gets the greenest and cheapest from the DPP office?’
He smiled at me in a way I had slowly come to understand didn’t carry any intentional condescension. ‘Well, twelve-year-olds don’t have much money, do they?’
‘Judge, that’s not the answer I want to hear!’
He laughed and I turned to walk back out of his room. ‘Chickpeas!’ I shouted out in the corridor, to nobody. It was all so shitty and everybody knew it. They smiled because they understood my outrage, but outrage in that industry seemed unsustainable. Shelves downstairs were full of trials waiting to be heard. When one matter was finished, or cancelled, or thrown out of court, two more flew in, and no money was to be made from justice for twelve-year-olds.
I knew it wouldn’t be an option for me to hire an expensive counsel. Criminal offences are committed against an individual, but ‘The Crown’ prosecutes them. It was good that I didn’t have to pay for anything, but it also disempowered me.
A few of the associates were having lunch together and I joined them, sliding into a chair at the end of the kitchenette.
‘We’re comparing the most ridiculous shit we’ve heard people say in their defence,’ Nikki said to me.
‘Wow,’ I replied, nodding to indicate I wanted them to proceed.
‘One dude I saw was charged with a rape, right?’ Amanda said, and we all nodded, ‘And he said on the police record, repeatedly, that he knew she wasn’t consenting, but that he didn’t “rape” her because he didn’t cum inside her.’ We all burst out into loud laughter, and I slapped the table. ‘He couldn’t get legal aid to represent him, so he ended up just pleading at a really late stage.’
‘Holy shit,’ I said, my mouth hanging open.
‘I know,’ Amanda said, shaking her head.
‘I guess she was lucky that he was too stupid to actually deny it?’
‘I guess,’ she replied with a shrug.
After we adjourned the chickpeas sentence to the next day, Judge left to go to a meeting and I started psyching myself up to make the phone call to the police. I had to use the work landline because I couldn’t risk any of the judges seeing me chatting on my mobile. I couldn’t call from home because I lived in an old Queenslander and at least one of my housemates was perpetually within earshot. So my office was the only place I could do it, and I’d been waiting for an opportunity for about a week—a chance within normal office hours when Judge was out.
Sitting in front of my L-shaped desk, I spun slowly on my swivel chair, taking in a 360-degree panorama, soaking in the stacks of folders of sentencing remarks, the piles of depositions for future trials, the textbooks and loose-leafs filling the shelves behind me. I had been breathing it all in, every day—the reminder that my abuse was one tiny teardrop in a putrid ocean. I wondered if I would be further clogging the system by making a complaint. Was there another young woman, somewhere, waiting for a moment like this too? Definitely. I closed my eyes and imagined her, and I put my hands out onto my files and thought of the faces of all the women and children I’d seen in court. I’d seen them crying. I had felt their fear and their freeze when they relived their horrors in front of a cavernous room of angry adult strangers. I thought of all the things I wanted to tell them but couldn’t from behind my desk where I sat mute and neutral. That I admired them so much. That they were strong. That monsters were real, and that these men were what they looked like, and that everyone has a right to justice, and so did I.
I punched the number into the phone and a woman’s voice carried down the line.
‘Hello, Dutton Park Police Station, Constable Tanner speaking,’ she said clearly, if a little unenthusiastically.
‘Good afternoon, I’m calling to report a crime thing that happened to me when I was a kid.’
‘Okay, sure,’ she said, and I could picture her straightening up on the end of the line, ‘are you able to speak to me about this now?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the matter you’re calling about, how long ago did it happen?’
‘About fifteen years ago, when I was in primary school.’
‘Okay, I’m going to transfer you to someone from the CIB, is that alright?’
‘Sure.’
On hold, I waited and listened to audio encouraging people to use an anonymous firearms hotline. I couldn’t think of a single trial or sentence involving firearms coming across my desk all year. Why not provide an anonymous domestic violence tip-off hotline?
‘Hello, are you still there?’ the constable asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Unfortunately there’s nobody from CIB available at the moment. Are you happy for me to take some information from you and pass it on to an investigator there?’
‘Yes, sure.’
She took my personal details before things got more specific.
‘And can you tell me a little bit about what happened?’ she asked.
‘Yes, it was a one-time occurrence,’ I started, fighting through The Freeze coming back, ‘and it was my brother’s friend, he is six years older than me, and I was wearing my primary school uniform, and we were playing out the back of my house on the trampoline, and then my brother went inside the house, and when me and him were alone he put me on my back on the trampoline and,’ I stopped talking, ‘ah…’
I was sweating, panicking, and my eyes wouldn’t open. All my muscles were locked.
The woman on the phone waited, silently. I pushed through the rest of the details, listing them off like dot points; the blood was rushing back to the centre of my body, giving me pins and needles in my fingers, so I fumbled with the phone. She asked something I didn’t understand. I was still and silent for a while. Somewhere else.
‘Hello?’ she asked louder.
‘Oh, yes, yes, I’m here, sorry, what did you say?’
‘Are you still in contact with this person?’
‘Not really, no. He comes to family events sometimes. I had to invite him to my eighteenth birthday party. Sometimes he’s there when I visit my brother. He comments on my Facebook.’
‘Okay, but you don’t feel at risk that he will do anything again?’
‘Oh, no,’ I said.
‘And can you tell me his name and any details you know about him?’
‘Yes. His name is Samuel Levins.’ It felt dirty coming out of my mouth, but kind of good. Like vomiting.
I left the constable with my mobile number and hung up the phone, stinking—I had sweated through my shirt and then through my blazer. I stood up to go to the ladies’ room and felt unsure on my legs, wobbling on my high heels.
I knew I had to tell Vincent the next time I saw him, and that I was going to see him after work that night. I could have coffee with my father and look him in the eye and keep things from him, but I couldn’t with Vincent. With him things needed to be fully transparent. Truthful. Once before, years earlier, when the two of us were really drunk, I had alluded to something ‘maybe’ having happened to me when I was a child, but I couldn’t remember how much I’d really said or how he’d responded. It was time to get it out. I needed to be honest when I told him I’d been molested, and in turn I trusted he would be honest if he no longer felt attracted to me.
