CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Title Page
Prologue
PART 1
The Footy Show
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
PART 2
The Grey Zone
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
PART 3
The Winmar Moment
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
PART 4
End Game
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Copyright
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
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Epub ISBN 9781473520905
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Published by Yellow Jersey Press 2014
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Copyright © Anna Krien 2013
Anna Krien has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by
Yellow Jersey Press
Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
First published in Australia in 2013 by
Black Inc., an imprint of Schwartz Media Pty Ltd
www.vintage-books.co.uk
A Penguin Random House Company
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780224100021
I have changed the name of the defendant in the following account of a rape trial. On grounds of confidentiality I am not permitted to give the complainant’s name, and in fairness I believe the defendant’s name should be suppressed here for the same reason. Several other names have also been changed.
As is customary in rape trials, the complainant’s evidence was given in closed court and cannot be reported.
When the members of the jury – ten men and two women – emerge from the back room, they don’t look at him. Their eyes do a darting sweep of the court, lifting up and over our outlines. The defendant’s seats are full, the complainant’s seats behind the prosecutor – except for a lone policewoman who has arrived to hear the verdict – are empty, as they have been since the beginning of the trial, and the press seats – where I am – are largely vacant.
Five days ago there had been barely any standing room as the reporters crammed in, opening and shutting the door in the middle of proceedings. A star footballer had arrived to give evidence. The Collingwood player took the stand jauntily, swinging a little in his chair as he spoke.
Today it’s just an ordinary man in the dock, his face grey with dread, eyes rimmed red, no big deal as far as headlines are concerned. ‘He’s not a footballer at all,’ the judge and prosecution had agreed before the jury was selected and the trial commenced. I turned to look at Justin Dyer then. Disbelief flickered across his face. He’d been dropped from his team in the Victorian Football League after the charges were laid.
‘No, he’s a hanger-on,’ said the prosecution.
‘Exactly,’ said the judge.
‘Have you reached your verdict?’ the judge now enquires. The foreman of the jury nods and stands up. The 23-year-old in the dock is answering to six counts: one of indecent assault, the rest – rape.
‘Not guilty.’
Justin buckles and lets out a huge wracking sob. His gasps seem to heave over his cordoned-off area, over the wooden banister, to his family. They let out a choking sound. The jury foreman trails off, looking at the man in the dock, the document in his hand shaking.
The judge nods at him to continue, and with each verdict of not guilty the sobbing grows louder, the family now holding themselves, arms crossed over one another, as if forming a kind of dinghy on a rough sea and taking the waves of Justin’s gasping as their own.
The jury members shift in their seats, fiddling with their hands, with the rings on their fingers, stealing wide-eyed looks at the dock. It is as if they are seeing Justin for the first time.
With my fingers, I try to push my own tears back into the seams of my eyes. I squeeze my nails into my palms, etching the skin, for distraction. The solicitor for the state, bringing to the court the charges initiated by Sarah Wesley, the complainant, sits facing the court. She exchanges a long, knowing look with the policewoman in the front row behind the Crown prosecutor.
As the jury is thanked and dismissed, I stare at my notepad. ‘Now they know the difference between what is said in popular media and reality,’ the judge says of the jurors to the lawyers. We all try to ignore the whirlpool of emotion in the corner of the room.
After the judge departs, the reporters stand awkwardly at the door, waiting for the family to settle, to sort themselves out and start leaving so they can ask for a quote or two. I stand with them, but I don’t really belong. I know this family now. I’ve sat with them outside for the past three weeks, waiting with them in that dead space. I put my pencil and notebook away, take a deep breath and cross over the empty seats into this flooding family on the defendant’s side.
His grandmother envelops me in a hug and I think, well, there goes my objectivity. And I’m struggling with this. It’s as if I’m inside out. The journalists at the door, their faces are unreadable, they have cool exteriors. I admire their poise, their unmuddied positions, absolved in their detachment. It’s all backwards for me. Because despite the verdict, I still don’t know who is guilty and who is innocent, and yet here I am, hugging the grandmother in the defendant’s corner, and that’s a problem, don’t you think?
Much like the federal election of 2010, the Australian Rules Football grand final that year was a draw. It was an unfathomable concept for players and spectators: how do you party when there are no winners and no losers? Then, to the delight of pubs, merchandise sellers and sausage makers, the Australian Football League announced a rematch between Collingwood and St Kilda. The Pies beat the Saints and the city of Melbourne was still cloaked in black and white crepe paper when the rumour of a pack rape by celebrating footballers began to surface. By morning, the head of the Victorian sexual crimes squad confirmed to journalists that they were preparing to question two Collingwood players, the young recruits Dayne Beams and John McCarthy. And so, as police were confiscating bedsheets from a townhouse in Dorcas Street, South Melbourne, the trial by media began.
‘Yet another alleged girl, making alleged allegations, after she awoke with an alleged hangover and I take it an alleged guilty conscience,’ the retired footballer Peter ‘Spida’ Everitt announced on Twitter, and followed it up with ‘Girls!! When will you learn! At 3am when you are blind drunk & you decide to go home with a guy ITS NOT FOR A CUP OF MILO!’ The morning TV host Kerri-Anne Kennerley picked up the thread, sympathising with players, saying that they ‘put themselves in harm’s way by picking up strays.’
When Justin Dyer first had an inkling that the weekend he’d had was going to be turned upside down – and it had been a good one too, grand final day, his mates had won, he’d picked up that night, gone one up in the ‘rooting competition’ he was having with his mates – he was driving to work in his ute, carpentry tools in the tray. Beams’s housemate called him on his mobile and said, that girl, she’s gone to the cops, said she’s been raped.
The rest of the drive was surreal, said Justin.
Then he got another call, this time from Beams, who said the cops were going to call him and not to say anything. To call Dale Curtis, Collingwood’s director of legal counsel, instead. From there, Justin was put in touch with David Galbally QC, the club’s lawyer. ‘I went to Galbally and wrote up my statement to take to the police. He said you’re a witness, not a suspect.’ But when he arrived at the station, police told him he was a suspect. ‘I felt sick. I kept wondering if this was really happening. Her original complaint was about Collingwood and then I came along.’
When Justin was charged with six counts of rape, one of attempted rape and one of indecent assault, Galbally told the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court that his client would contest the charges. At this, a few astute observers on AFL forums pricked up their ears. ‘Why is Dave Galbally QC the defendant’s lawyer?’ asked one commentator.
Apart from being friends with Dayne Beams – they had played together back in Queensland – Justin had nothing to do with Collingwood Football Club. The club he was playing for in the state league, the Coburg Tigers, was affiliated with Richmond, and rather than offer support Coburg decided to drop him. The board called him to a meeting and said, ‘You’re never going to get another game here.’
Justin was a small fish in big trouble. He knew no one. He was twenty-two years old, had recently broken up with his girlfriend of four years and was living out of home for the first time. He and a mate had driven to Melbourne ten months earlier, to the home of Aussie Rules, where the two midfielders could play footy closer to the roving eyes of talent scouts. So, when the shit hit, he was grateful to find himself tucked under the arm of Galbally, despite not really knowing why.
But with Beams and McCarthy not yet in the clear, the reason for the QC’s presence seemed pretty obvious to an outsider like me. It made sense to control the narrative. Dyer was a nobody, but what had happened that night and how it revealed itself could affect ‘real’ footballers, not to mention the richest footy club in town.
Other things about the case interested me, too. There was the girl, Sarah Wesley.
*
Over a decade ago, in the front bar of a pub in North Fitzroy, I listened to the pub trivia going on in the back room. ‘What was the name of the girl who died in a hotel room with Gary Ablett?’
I remember sucking in the air as though I’d been punched. Surely this isn’t pub trivia, I thought, then just as quickly I prayed that someone would remember her name, the twenty-year-old footy fan who lay comatose from a drug overdose in Melbourne’s Hyatt hotel while forty-year-old Ablett Senior, known as ‘God’ to his admirers, called an ambulance and then did a runner, hiding out with his manager, Ricky Nixon. For hours the girl was simply a ‘Jane Doe’ in the hospital.
‘Horan!’ one guy yelled. ‘Alisha Horan!’ His trivia team whooped.
I wrote the incident down on the back of a beer coaster.
Three years later, in 2003, two sports journalists at the Sydney Morning Herald, Jacquelin Magnay and Jessica Halloran, wrote about the ‘Dark Side of the Game,’ revealing a culture of sharing women in rugby league. Describing ‘gangbangs’ as a rite of passage, the reporters highlighted two incidents.
A 42-year-old Coffs Harbour woman had laid a sexual assault complaint against the Canterbury Bulldogs. She said she had consented to sex with one player when they visited her hometown, but not a second, while a third had been in the room as an ‘observer.’
The second incident, which later became infamous on the ABC’s Four Corners, involved the Cronulla Sharks’ trip to New Zealand and a nineteen-year-old female hotel employee. Magnay and Halloran wrote: ‘After the Sharks complaint, one club called a team meeting and warned its players not to share women. After the Bulldogs incident, an official at another club told its players “to make sure the woman leaves happy and then she won’t complain.”’
Following the article’s appearance, the National Rugby League’s then chief executive, David Gallop, wrote a five-page letter of outraged complaint to the Sydney Morning Herald’s publisher. Magnay, who has covered rugby league on and off for almost two decades, said the scepticism about the story, and the impulse to dismiss it or ‘shoot the messenger,’ was maddening. ‘At the time, we were perceived as troublemakers, as if we were making it up, that we were fantasists. It really annoyed me that we were not being taken seriously and people considered what we wrote to be so trivial.’
Then, twelve months later, the Canterbury Bulldogs were involved in another incident at Coffs Harbour. A brawl broke out at the Plantation Hotel after locals took exception to players groping women on the dance floor. By morning a 21-year-old woman had been taken to hospital in an ambulance, claiming that up to eight players had raped her. They were staying at the same hotel where the 42-year-old woman had made her allegation – her case having been subsequently dropped by the director of public prosecutions because, like so many rape complaints, it boiled down to the woman’s word against that of the players.
Agreeing to speak to 60 Minutes, the 42-year-old woman, ‘Kate,’ who still lived in the town, described her reaction on hearing the new allegations on the radio:
It just sort of threw me back, bang, and I started, nervous, I was like sort of really shaking, thinking that they’ve actually done it again. And how dare they even think to come back to Coffs Harbour where they were staying and just do it again, just exactly the same.
She went on to describe the night that had led her to the police. She had agreed to have sex with a player at the Pacific Bay Resort. ‘I consented to that and I had no problems there,’ she said. ‘He went downstairs … I thought he was going to get a glass of water.’ When he returned, the lights were out and the room was dark. ‘I didn’t sort of have face-to-face contact with him … as we were having sex on the bed [a second time] I saw a flash or a shadow from the side of me and as I’ve looked up there was another footballer … standing there masturbating. So I’ve quickly turned around and moved what I thought was [name deleted] away from me and it wasn’t [him].’
Kate said she started screaming and yelling, gathered up her things and fled the apartment. She was followed by the player she’d originally consented to have sex with, who now pleaded with her not to go to the police, that it would ruin his reputation, that he had a new wife and baby. As she sat in the gutter, crying, two club officials approached her.
They said, ‘Well, what’s happening, what’s going on?’ And I gave them the rundown and one of the officials, he said to me straight out, ‘Well, is this a habit of yours? Do you always go out doing this sort of thing?’ … I said, ‘I’m going to go to the police.’ And they said, ‘Oh, no, no, no, don’t go to the police, we’ll deal with it, we’ll deal with it in our tribunal, they won’t get away with it, you know, please just write us your statement and we’ll deal with it.’
When news of the second Coffs Harbour incident surfaced, Magnay rang David Gallop for a comment. The first thing he said to her was, ‘Are you going to say I told you so?’
‘He’d obviously been mulling over it for some time and come to the conclusion, whether these new allegations were true or false, that there was a serious problem,’ Magnay told me.
The Bulldogs, on the other hand, quickly closed ranks. The club’s football manager selected four players to speak to the police that Sunday and then they all flew home to Sydney. On Tuesday, after training, the players and club management met in private to discuss what had gone on at Coffs. This discussion became known as the ‘truth meeting’ or, as critics put it, the ‘let’s get our stories straight’ meeting. The players reacted angrily to the media scrutiny, complaining they were being portrayed as a ‘bunch of rapists.’ At a training session as the team ran past journalists and photographers, one player yelled that they should ‘pull their dicks out and come all over them.’ In Coffs Harbour, a sign saying ‘Charge the Dirty Dogs’ was hung on an overpass over a local road.
Down south, the AFL was no doubt holding its breath, praying for the ensuing storm to pass them by. It didn’t.
Less than a month later, in March 2004, police questioned two St Kilda players, Stephen Milne and Leigh Montagna, over the alleged rape of a nineteen-year-old girl. The girl claimed to have been on the receiving end of a now disturbingly familiar ‘prank,’ telling police that at one stage in the night she thought it was Montagna trying to have sex with her again. She repeatedly said ‘No.’ When the man kept trying against her wishes, she realised the two men had ‘swapped’ partners in the dark. She ran from the room. Milne later pleaded guilty to indecent assault after the rape charges were dropped.
It was now official: something dark and malicious had seeded itself within football culture. Sensing a shift in public perception, the chiefs of the Australian Football League and the National Rugby League decided to acknowledge the problem. The AFL’s chief executive, Andrew Demetriou, called on women to come forward with their stories, while David Gallop put together a team to produce a plan to change the attitude of league footballers towards women. The team included a feminist academic, Dr Catharine Lumby, the manager of the NSW Rape Crisis Centre, Karen Willis, and a writer and queer politics educator, Dr Kath Albury. ‘He could have hired a public relations firm,’ Lumby told me, ‘but he hired us instead.’
*
The game has changed. Whomever you talk to in the world of Aussie Rules says as much. For some people – such as indigenous players – that’s a good thing. Following the introduction of its policy against racial and religious vilification in 1995, the AFL can now boast that more than 10 per cent of its players are indigenous, substantially more than the 2 per cent of the larger population that is indigenous. But for others, well, football just ain’t like it used to be.
In a Herald Sun Q&A column in 2011, the sports journalist Jon Anderson and a former Carlton player, David Rhys-Jones, bemoaned the passing of the glory days. ‘In many ways I feel sorry for today’s players,’ said Rhys-Jones. ‘Okay, they get the money, but do they have the fun? No way.’ Back then, he said, journalists rolled around in the ‘same drip tray’ as the footballers. Anderson chipped in with a memory. Remember when someone let loose with the fire extinguisher at Brian ‘The Whale’ Roberts’ pub? Sigh.
If the moment can be pinpointed when some footballers’ respect, or lack of it, for their fellow human beings first came under serious scrutiny, it was in 1993, when Nicky Winmar responded to on-field racist abuse by lifting his jersey and pointing to his black skin. The photograph of that event is now iconic. This defiant act, said the footballer Andrew McLeod at a recent United Nations forum on racism in sport, ‘made the AFL sit up and take notice.’ Two years later, the racial vilification policy was rolled out across the league and extended to every football competition in Australia.
While the new rules soon became a source of pride for some, to others they signified the disinheritance of a certain type of footy culture. Criticising Demetriou’s 2004 call for women to come forward, John Elliott, the former president of the Carlton Football Club for twenty years, said the AFL was opening up a ‘Pandora’s Box.’ Elliott claimed that while he was president of Carlton during the eighties and nineties, the club had paid at least four women $5000 each to dissuade them from making public claims of sexual assault.
I think we had people who claimed to be raped by our players – women they were, not men – on four or five occasions. Not once did any of those stories get into the press because in those days we probably had only twenty people writing in the press and they weren’t interested in all that sort of nonsense. We’d pay the sheilas off and wouldn’t hear another word.
Elliott, also a former leading businessman and Liberal Party president, implied that many women had been paid by clubs to keep their silence in settlements now referred to as ‘hush money.’ The past had been paid for, he believed, no point in revisiting it.
And so, as the codes strove to do the right thing, it became clear that something or someone was resisting.
Back in 1995, when the football personality Sam Newman impersonated Nicky Winmar by ‘blacking up’ on The Footy Show, it was a way of saying ‘up yours’ to the new racial and religious vilification policy. A decade later, as the AFL rolled out its Respect & Responsibility program towards women, The Footy Show responded with another ‘harmless’ prank.
On live television, Newman staple-gunned a photo of the Age’s senior football journalist Caroline Wilson to a mannequin’s head. The mannequin was wearing a satin bra and underpants. ‘I tell you what, she’s a fair piece, Caro,’ he said, standing back to admire the dummy. As he held up items of clothing, fumbling around the breasts, one of the show’s hosts, Garry Lyon, laughed and wrung his hands.
‘You getting nervous about this?’ asked Newman, as he approached Wilson’s teeth with a black texta. ‘Garry – can I just say something, Garry?’ he continued. ‘We’re only having fun … and I know you’re getting nervous about it, but we’re only having fun. If you’re on our show, you’re on our show –’
‘We are!’ yelped Lyon, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. The studio audience whooped and cheered for Newman. ‘We are!’ Lyon said again.
Consciously or unconsciously, Newman’s gag and many others like it were designed to pull down these new values. Newman tested Lyon’s loyalty on air, later defending the mannequin gag as a kind of ‘male’ compliment. It was a sign, he said, that The Footy Show, aka Sam Newman, accepted Caroline Wilson. And this gets us to the crux of the problem, not just with Aussie Rules and Rugby League, but also with American football, European soccer – turn the ball into a puck, put a stick in their hands, and it’s a problem in ice hockey. The problem is not the game per se, but the macho culture of humiliation that tends to shadow and control it.
David Galbally surveyed the Magistrates’ Court with the assurance of a top predator. His hawkish features, sharp blue eyes and ruffle of silver hair put the court to a kind of clunky shame. The prosecutor appeared on the back foot, he hadn’t got copies of this or that, his hair was a mess and his suit untidy. While he was blustering through his papers, Galbally was at ease, making jokes, working the room. I was at Justin Dyer’s committal hearing, a mini-trial compressed into two days in July 2011, a brief parade of witnesses for the magistrate to test if there was sufficient evidence to take the charges to trial.
In a light grey suit, Justin sat silently behind his lawyer, his parents beside him. He watched as people appeared on the stand – apparitions from a solitary Saturday night nine months ago. People he knew, others he’d seen that night also partying but didn’t know – friends of friends, friends of hers, there was even the taxi driver who had driven him home – all lined up to weave their fading fragments of a night into a single narrative.
And finally, she was there, not physically but on a screen.
Later I asked Justin how he felt seeing her, if he had changed the way she looked in his mind. After all, he’d only met her that once. A quiet man, Justin shrugged. ‘I don’t know, I was angry.’
It was seven and a half months since Justin Dyer had been charged with the rape of Sarah Wesley. He had first been summoned to court six weeks after the grand final celebrations. Camera crews and reporters had crowded around him, the footage later rolling on the evening news while newspapers immediately posted photos of him online.
In one photo, he looked defiant, head held high, eyes slit thin like the gaps in a venetian blind – but those slivers revealed nothing, they were glassy, shadowed and unfathomable. Pale skin, the kind of stubble that re-emerges five seconds after a shave, his brown hair trimmed in a typical barber’s cut – short sides, long top.
What was most striking about the image was Justin’s lone figure. He was without his team, carefully cut out from the pack – the story being as much about who wasn’t in the photo as who was. And while none of the news media said as much, the innuendo was there – the initial police leak had suggested an evening with several protagonists, so where were the others?
On a post-season training camp in Arizona apparently.
Six weeks had passed since Sarah’s initial police report. Beams and McCarthy were not yet in the clear, but as Justin fronted up to court to hear his charges, they were completing high-altitude training with Collingwood. The police were still investigating the young players, but so far rounding up Justin had been easier.
Once the charges were laid, photos of Justin had multiplied on the internet – walking with his mother from court, emerging with his lawyers through a glass revolving door – and each time he appeared steely, a shell. But a scrum of cameras can do that.
*
Galbally handed a young redheaded man in the witness box a copy of his original police statement and asked him to read out the highlighted portion to the magistrate, which he did:
I asked her if she had sex with Nate because I knew she went home with him. She said she did and then I asked what happened. It took a while for her to get it all out. I knew something was wrong because I’d never seen her crying like this … Then she said there were Collingwood footballers there. She repeated she had sex with Nate and that while she was having sex with Nate he couldn’t get an erection. Then she said she had Beams on one side and Nate on the other …
This was Tom Shaw reading. Studying law, he lived at the same residential college as Sarah. His room was one down from hers and they were good friends. Best friends, even. Sarah had celebrated her twenty-first birthday not long before the events and Tom had made one of the speeches.
Shaw told the court how he, Sarah and another friend, Olivia, got ready to go out that Saturday evening. Pouring Red Bull and vodkas, they went back and forth between each other’s rooms, playing different tunes on a laptop. Sarah was wanting to meet up with Nate Cooper, a VFL player she had met two weeks before at the Turf Bar, and so the three of them were planning to head to Prahran where he was at a party. But then she got word he was on his way to Eve nightclub in South Melbourne, so they went there instead. Olivia, who wasn’t drinking, was driving.
It was about midnight as they queued to get into Eve, and Tom reckoned they – he and Sarah – sobered up a little in the cool air. Tall, blonde and striking, Sarah was in a colourful dress and strappy high-heel sandals, her legs bare and a small black purse slung across her shoulder. Tom was wearing – well, who cares? Inside, it was rounds of raspberry vodkas, dancing, and the three lost sight of each other. Around 5 a.m., Tom was trying to get in touch with Sarah on his phone and then Olivia received a text from her saying she had gone home with Nate.
The next morning Sarah called Tom, crying, and he went to her room.
‘She detailed and complained about the fact that she had sex with these people, Nate and these other people, in the room?’ asked Galbally. ‘She was telling you that she had sex against her will?’
Tom nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘And that she was effectively raped by them?’
‘Yes.’
Galbally continued: ‘Alright, then you detail everything else that she said to you. At that point in time the names that she mentions to you are primarily, well, are Nate, Beams and Macca?’
‘Yes.’
Sarah knew only the nicknames of the men and that they were from Collingwood. So Tom got his laptop out and brought up Nate’s Facebook page and typed ‘Beams’ into the Collingwood website.
Galbally again: ‘And she told you that there are a number of males coming in and out of the room?’
‘Yes.’
‘And did she tell you that those males were naked?’
‘Not at that time.’
‘Did she tell you at a later time that they were naked?’
‘Someone had their pants around their ankles, yes.’
By this stage, as Tom sat with Sarah in her room, laptop open on the bed, her parents were on their way to the college. Soon Olivia, who lived nearby, would be there too. In this time, Sarah hadn’t mentioned Justin to Tom. But then his name flashed up on the screen of her phone. It was a call that simultaneously drew Justin into the allegations but also made them far from clear-cut. Tom picked up Sarah’s phone and answered.
Not realising that it wasn’t her on the line, Justin said, ‘Hi, it’s Justin. From last night.’
There was a pause until Tom said, ‘It’s Tom, Sarah’s friend.’
Justin explained that he was checking to see if Sarah had got home okay, that he had put her in a taxi. Tom thanked him. They hung up.
Soon after Sarah called the police.
*
When the policewoman in charge of the investigation, Detective Senior Constable Christine Stafford, took the stand, Galbally read from her original notes, asking her to confirm them.
‘“Had consented sex with Nate” … then goes on to say “Nate introduces victim to Dayne Beams”?’
The policewoman, her finger tracing the words in her notebook in front of her, nodded. ‘Correct.’
‘“Then Collingwood player, felt compelled to have sex but … not forced.” Not forced?’
‘Correct.’
‘“Two to four other naked males in the room?”’
‘Correct.’
‘“Then they grab her and force her to perform oral sex on male and vaginal rape?”’
‘Correct.’
‘“Remember saying ‘No’?”’
‘Correct.’
‘“Felt trapped.”’
Stafford nodded again and repeated after him, ‘Felt trapped.’
Yet despite the allegations Sarah made against the young men in the South Melbourne townhouse, it emerged that the police had wound up their investigation of the two Magpie players six months before today’s hearing, deciding not to lay any charges. Instead Justin was charged with raping Sarah in an alleyway after she left the townhouse. The difficulty was this: how to discuss what had happened in the alley without referring to the incident in the bedroom some 500 metres away? And had Justin been in the bedroom? Was he under the impression that Sarah was happy to ‘do the rounds’?
When the reporters present at the committal hearing discovered that the two Collingwood footballers wouldn’t be called to give evidence for the time being, they gathered up their things and made for the elevators.
One veteran journalist, noticing I was going to stick around, said disbelievingly, ‘You don’t really think there’s something in this, do you?’
I shrugged, and then gestured at the Collingwood lawyer in a huddle with Justin and his parents in the foyer. ‘Then why is he still here?’ I said quietly, nodding towards Galbally.
The journalist looked at Galbally, who was doing all the talking while the Dyer family listened, and then back at me. ‘You think it’s some kind of conspiracy?’
I recoiled. ‘No, of course not.’
The journalist smiled at me and said goodbye. I sat down and watched the huddle, the pale-faced Justin intently listening to Galbally as he would to a coach. Conspiracy. It was definitely not the word I was looking for. After all, Galbally was looking after his client – that was clear as you watched him in action. But at the same time, the lawyer had succeeded in keeping the star footballers from attending the hearing, while every other bit player from the evening had appeared.
And now the entire bedroom episode was being sidelined. I couldn’t help wondering why Justin was the only one left facing charges.
‘Does it matter?’ a former policeman said to me when I rang him to ask how police decide whom to charge when there are not only several events, but also several people involved.
I was unsure. ‘What if someone is potentially more guilty than another?’
‘Guilty is guilty,’ he replied.
Towards the end of the committal, the prosecution called Kathy Hackett to the stand. Hackett was living in a house in one of a few alleyways that came off the street that Sarah and Justin had walked along to get a cab. Responding to a police door-knock, Hackett said she’d heard something outside her bedroom window, and the police soon decided that it was her alley where the alleged rape had occurred.
‘I felt sick to the stomach when I heard what happened,’ Hackett said boldly on the stand.
I sat up sharply. Had she heard about ‘what happened’ before she spoke to police, or worse, did the police tell her what they were investigating before they took her statement?
Hackett told the court that she had been sleeping that morning when she heard people outside her window. It was ‘muffled,’ she said, and she thought she heard someone say, ‘No, stop it.’
‘Now, is there anything you want to clarify or add or change to your statement that you made?’ asked the prosecution.
Hackett nodded. ‘Just as when, when I thought about after I spoke to the police that I could have swore I heard, um, clip-clop noises, noises like she was running away.’
‘Right, so what you said you heard – clip-clop noises. When did you hear those?’
‘After whatever because I’d – I’d heard her go off.’
I didn’t realise it to begin with, but my mouth was hanging open. I looked around the courtroom, trying to catch someone’s eye.
Is this for real? I wanted to say. This can’t be taken seriously: surely the further away you are from an event, the less you remember – not more.
*
After a break, we returned to the courtroom to hear the magistrate’s decision. Justin was asked to stand. The magistrate cleared his throat and announced that the case would be going to trial. The Dyer family looked stunned. The evidence had seemed so flimsy, mostly the recollections of drunk twenty-year-olds and then Hackett with her recent recollection of clip-clop sounds. But then there was Sarah’s evidence in closed court: what had she said? Was it credible? The magistrate must have thought so. Justin was going to trial early next year and although the Dyer family didn’t know it yet, David Galbally wouldn’t be accompanying them.
‘It flows into the record of interview, it flows all over the place, Your Honour,’ said Malcolm Thomas, Justin’s new defence counsel. ‘It flows into complaint evidence, it flows into medical evidence.’
It was day one of Justin’s trial. He sat silently in the dock, watching as his barrister, the prosecutor and the judge wove a special kind of magic – a triangle of dialogue peppered with mysterious numbers and references. A second lawyer, female, sat next to Justin’s barrister – ‘They thought it would be good for the jury to see a woman on the defence team,’ Justin confided to me later. Solicitors also sat with the barristers – for the Crown, one with long auburn hair and a Mona Lisa smile. Busy scribbling notes and flicking through files to fish out documents, the solicitors did much of the legal grunt work, their notes fuelling the orators in the magic triangle. Justin’s mother, a largish strong-looking woman with a blonde bob and wearing a blouse and brooch, sat behind his lawyer. His younger brother was also there, wearing a black suit, and so too a young woman I later found out was Justin’s girlfriend.
Frowning in concentration, they cocked their heads as they tried to snatch at fleeting fragments of clarity. ‘You can’t isolate 200 from 201,’ said one lawyer. ‘It flows from 199.’ The three men in the triangle were trying to untangle the events on the evening of Collingwood’s premiership win. How to separate whatever occurred between Justin and Sarah in an alleyway from the incident in the bedroom of the South Melbourne townhouse? How to stem the flow of the bedroom narrative into the alleyway? Where did the narrative of the trial begin, how did it end, and what to do with the middle? How to question witnesses without them slipping up and revealing to jurors that there was more to the night than a solitary rape complaint?
It was a strange thing to watch. It was as if the defence counsel, the prosecutor and the judge were getting their story straight before presenting it to the jury. I couldn’t quite go along with them. How could they unravel the sequence of events without losing the complexity of what was being assessed? Or was that the point – to keep it simple for a jury? Were they hollowing out the truth by excising a part of the night, or making the truth sharper, easier to see?
‘… 303 Dorcas Street, a place which I do not wish to go,’ said Chris Ryan SC, the Crown prosecutor, referring to the events in the bedroom. Judge Mark Taft agreed, and so for the most part did defence counsel Thomas.
JUDGE