Nick Ryan: My dear friend deserves justice

Nick Ryan: I was a debate partner and trusted confidant of the woman accusing the Attorney-General of rape – and she was a more memorable person than he said.

The memory of a deceased friend is fragile. It’s not something with which you’re careless. It’s certainly not something you just toss into a firestorm. At the centre of serious allegations surrounding the actions of the federal Attorney-General at a debating tournament in 1988 stands a woman who can no longer speak for herself. I’ve spent most of the past week trying, and mostly failing, it feels like, to do that for her.

I’m one of a small group of old friends with whom she shared these allegations in 2019, a process I recognise now as the recruitment of her own little army. Others have known of them much longer.

It’s a conversation I had with her on the evening of August 21, 2019, that has me where I am now.

We were sitting in a banquette upstairs at Peel Street bar Clever Little Tailor, and she detailed her plans to come forward with the allegations that came to light this week. If she noticed the colour drain from my face, she didn’t say anything.

It breaks my heart to look back now and remember my first thought was just what coming forward would do to her.

We’ll never know because even the contemplation of it became too much to bear.

But on that night, she was strong and resolute. Crystal-clear in her thinking and acting like the decision she’d made had lifted a substantial weight from her shoulders. And if you could have faith in anyone to prosecute their case, it would her.

We became friends at 15, back in the 1980s, the days of Depeche Mode and Dire Straits. And debating.

Nick Ryan with his debate partners in 1988: Kamal Farouque and the woman.

While a group of her school friends had become entangled with mine, she and I were spending more time together, trying out for the state debating team, spending weekends arguing furiously in the university cloisters, still bruised from sporting endeavours; hers hockey, mine football.

I’ve never been especially modest and feel no need to start now. I was pretty good. But she was much better.

She first made the state team in Year 10. It took me two more years to join her. To watch her in full flight was really something, a lesson in how finding something to admire in another also offers up a side serve of self-doubt.

I just wanted to be half as good as her.

That debating scene was not for shrinking violets. It takes a certain kind of person to want to get up on their feet and attack another’s argument in the pursuit of fun.

Debating tournaments are the concentration of a large number of alpha personalities into a tight space. It’s a crucible that forges lifelong memories and friendships.

Most of the friends in whom she confided when preparing to come forward are her friends from those debating days. It says a lot about how significant those days were in her life, and in ours. It’s why we’ve been just a little surprised at the Attorney-General’s recollection of those times.

His memory of someone he competed against and socialised with at two national debating championships in 1986 and 1987; someone who became his teammate in the Australian team at the end of that 1987 tournament and went on to compete at the 1988 World Intervarsity tournament in Sydney; is described when addressing her parents at his media conference as “I only knew your daughter for the briefest of periods”.

To us, she was far more memorable than that.

At the media conference, the Attorney-General said, “I remember the person as an intelligent, bright, happy person”. In that he is right. We remember her that way too. But we also know there were times in her life when the brightness and happiness receded – fodder for those who use her mental-health struggles to publicly discredit her now.

They’re attempting to raise doubts with which we’ve already wrestled, doubts assuaged by having looked her in the eye and asked her difficult questions.

It’s an experience that has brought us here, in a place none of us really want to be but accept we now must. The experience has given a middle-aged, middle-class white man some understanding of just how daunting it must be for complainants to come forward and its shown, in heartbreaking numbers, that other women I know understand this too well.

In the past week, some have accused those who speak for her of being driven by political malice, but our advocacy is the very definition of bipartisanship. None of us was so naive to think this wouldn’t become a huge story but we find it interesting those who shout “trial by media” are quickest to anoint themselves counsel for the defence. We remain consistent in simply asking for an independent inquiry, where substantial evidence of a very serious nature can be properly tested, with proper process for all involved.

I grew up under a lawyer’s roof; the presumption of innocence a concept as well understood as the need to brush your teeth, but that presumption is the starting point for a process in which it can be tested in the courts. That process isn’t available here. It’s a starting point, not a full stop. It’s a shield every defendant takes into a courtroom but it’s not something to be used to block the door.

NSW police closed their investigations, their finding of insufficient admissable evidence pounced upon by some to question the validity of all this. But that evidence is insufficient only in the sense she’s not here to stand by it in a process designed for criminal punishment, including potential loss of liberty.

Lawyers acquainted with her evidence say it is arguably admissible in civil proceedings, certainly proceedings designed to test someone’s fitness for office. There are some whose offer to assist NSW police was not taken up, and are prepared to share their information under oath to an inquiry. We feel, for the sake of everyone caught up in this sorry mess, they should be given that chance.

To us, her death is a great tragedy.

It’s not the procedural convenience some would like it to be.