Karen Williams opens up about drink driving as she makes shock announcement
In an explosive tell-all, Karen Williams drops a career bombshell as she reveals what really happened the night she was caught drink-driving.
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Karen Williams doesn’t want your sympathy. She wants a fair go, and to be remembered for more than that “one stupid human error” that led to her “darkest of days”.
In an astounding fall from grace, the Mayor of Redland City was charged with high-range drink driving in 2022, and while no conviction was recorded, the court of public opinion crucified her.
There were immediate calls for her to resign, then came death threats, social media trolling and, to this day, harassment and persecution.
But the 57-year-old wife, mother and grandmother insists there is “so much more” to her story – and that fateful night – and she is speaking out now because, well, it’s time.
Williams will not contest the next local government election in March 2024.
Revealing her decision exclusively in The Courier-Mail, she says her next chapter will be about giving back to her family as she and her police officer husband of 33 years, Peter Williams, excitedly await the birth of their third grandchild in April.
“I’m not the devil incarnate,” Williams says from her Mt Cotton home, set on 19 lush hectares overlooking Moreton Bay.
“I actually love my community almost as much as I love my family.
“I want my legacy to be about the many things I’ve accomplished for our region, not that out-of-character incident I will forever be ashamed of.”
Much has been written – and assumptions made – about what transpired on the 23rd of June last year when Williams crashed her council-owned Lexus into a fence and tree at the intersection of Queen and Wellington streets in Cleveland. We know she handed down the budget in the morning, then regrouped with colleagues for a traditional post-budget lunch, at which she drank several glasses of wine – four, she told Cleveland Magistrates Court.
And we know that at 5pm she led a Zoom meeting which included family members of people killed by drink drivers.
The timing could not have been worse, but Williams tells Qweekend the meeting was about the flawed youth justice system, and not road safety, as widely reported.
Present were Russell and Ann Field – the parents of Matthew Field, who was killed with fiancee Kate Leadbetter and their unborn son Miles in Alexandra Hills on January 26, 2021, by a teenager high on drugs and booze.
Two weeks before the Zoom meeting, a judge ruled the offender would be released after serving just six of his 10-year sentence. The Redlands community, and indeed the nation, reeled in disbelief. “My heart sank and I cried together with Russell on the phone the next morning,” Williams recalls.
“We decided we would run a petition and get the government to understand things needed to change with youth justice laws. I thought I had a win when I got the state member for Capalaba (Labor’s Don Brown) to sign the petition (for tougher penalties for youths breaching bail) but he backflipped two days later.”
On June 22, Brown voted in parliament against reinstating breach of bail as a juvenile offence.
At Williams’ Zoom meeting the very next night, Judy Lindsay – whose daughter Hayley Russell died in a crash caused by a drink driver in Alexandra Hills on May 16, 2009 – was also in attendance. So were Michelle Liddle and Ben Beaumont, parents of Redcliffe teen Angus Beaumont who was stabbed in the heart during an altercation with two repeat violent offenders on March 13, 2020.
“The reason I was having that discussion was not road safety,” Williams says.
“There were people in that meeting who had genuinely lost children due to youth justice failures. Nobody listened when I said it then, but if you lodge an RTI (right to information) on my diary, you’ll see that meeting was about youth justice laws, but how can you defend yourself?”
Williams – who became mayor in 2012 – believes media coverage of her drink driving episode was excessive. “That young man (who killed Field, Leadbetter and their baby) never had to have his name on the front page of the paper like I did,” she says. “There are no excuses for what I did but there are contributing factors.”
Williams says she got “too close” and failed to pay attention to her own wellbeing.
“I’m a people person, I feel people’s pain, and I was just getting too absorbed, thinking about Ann Field … so I don’t know if I was suffering from guilt, because I’d just become a grandmother for the second time, but I couldn’t even talk about what happened (to those families) without getting teary and emotional – which was when my husband started saying, ‘you’re getting too close, Karen’.
“Budget time came, with lots of pressure to meet the expectations of community, to do all the things you want to do but not increase rates, and I hadn’t eaten for 24 hours because I was go, go, go.
“I didn’t check in on myself, I didn’t even think about my state of mind, I just knew it was time for me to get home, and the rest is history.”
Around 8pm, she crashed the Lexus, and recorded a blood alcohol concentration of 0.177, more than three times the legal limit.
“I wasn’t injured and neither was anyone else, but I opened my eyes and thought, ‘oh shit’,” she says. “I don’t feel like I consumed a whole lot of alcohol but I was emotionally spent.
“I was tired, I’d only eaten maybe one or two crackers at the lunch, and all I can say is if anyone wants to do a case study on what your emotional wellbeing is when you do these sorts of things, well, I’d be a great case study.”
On August 1, 2022, Williams was sentenced to 80 hours community service and disqualified from driving for six months, with Magistrate Deborah Vasta saying the Mayor was deserving of forgiveness and a second chance.
Contrary to previous reports, Williams personally paid for the damaged car and fence, at a total cost of around $57,000.
“Ratepayers have never been out of pocket – this is just more misinformation put out there by people who want me gone,” she says.
“I’ve never lied about what happened and, no, I don’t have a drinking problem.”
“You are a drunk and a liar. Do all of us a favour and stop stealing our oxygen.”
“Resign you two-faced c--t.”
“We all feel like vomiting when we see your ugly face which hides a disgusting, evil animal with no genuine remorse.”
“F--k off and we know where you live.”
Williams initially began deleting abusive emails and social media posts such as these
but then decided to set some aside in a personal folder “because there will always be a time
to reflect”.
Within days of the drink driving incident, Judy Lindsay launched a petition to have Williams removed from office. (Councillors can only be sacked over electoral or integrity offences). Police Minister Mark Ryan, federal Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and Nationals leader David Littleproud were among others pressuring Williams to quit.
Don Brown did dozens of social media posts about her incident, Williams says, and “whipped up the city into a frenzy”.
Her LNP party colleague, state Opposition Leader David Crisafulli weighed in, saying there should be “consequences for actions”, but Williams doggedly refused to budge.
She instead took five weeks of unpaid
leave “to pull myself together and work out what’s next”.
“It would have been easier to walk away – but I wanted my family to understand that it wasn’t going to end on that note after 20 years.”
Williams is humbled that not everyone has been hostile. “I’ve had people come up and put their arms around me in shopping centres and ask if I’m OK,” she says.
“Other mayors have reached out to see how I’m doing, and a lot of people say nice things and that’s when I say, ‘I’m sorry I let you down’.
“I will never be that person who walks around not bothered by what people think. You know, any normal human being would be embarrassed and ashamed.
“When people look you in the eye, you always try to work out what they’re thinking, and so I’ll always carry that with me, there’s no doubt about it.”
Williams has been particularly touched by Russell and Ann Field.
“Despite some of the really nasty things people said, I was probably more upset because Russell and Ann had got to know me as a person, and I realised that in a way I’d let them down, and that broke my heart more than anything.
“You kind of get used to the same old vitriol and toxic politics in this region, but I really wanted to help them make a difference.”
She says the Fields called her some time after the incident: “They rang to see how I was …
I wouldn’t have been surprised if they never wanted to speak to me again, but they
were caring.”
In early November this year, Williams was invited to a fundraiser for Matthew Field’s older brother, Andrew, who tragically has been diagnosed with an incurable brain tumour.
“That family has been through so much; they’re incredible people,” Williams says, “we’re friends now.”
When Peter Williams, a senior sergeant with the Ethical Standards Command based in Brisbane, got a frantic call from his wife saying, “you’d better get down here”, on June 23 last year, he was shocked.
“It was so unlike her to do something like that,” Peter, 59, says.
“Then I went into protect mode because I knew what was going to happen. It was dark leading up to that drink driving episode but even darker afterwards. Dark because I could see it getting to her and she didn’t realise.
“Being a police officer, we come across grief and tragedy all the time and, as a detective, I’ve worked on homicides and suicides and we learn to deal with things differently as coppers.
“I could see she wasn’t coping and how emotional she was in the lead up. Then after it happened, she went into shut down and didn’t want to be seen or venture out. We had media trespassing on our property.
“Karen will always say ‘no excuse’ – and there’s not, we get that – but there’s so much else she’s done and she didn’t want to leave that as her legacy, and that’s why she’s continued to drive forward and hasn’t given up as mayor.”
Williams interjects: “I haven’t done it on my own. I couldn’t have raised an amazing family without Peter, who has been my rock. He’s also helped me in my role.”
The couple met as teenagers on the school bus – she, a student at Mt Carmel College in Wynnum (a Catholic girls’ school that closed in 1992) and he, at Iona College in nearby Lindum.
“She was the girl sitting up the back being loud and I was the quiet guy up the front,” he says. “But we had friends in common and a few years later, during Expo ’88, we got together.”
Karen Tomaszewski, as she was then, was a yodeller in the Munich Festhaus. (She continues to perform after learning as a child).
Peter was a detective in the juvenile aid bureau in Camp Hill. They married on June 2, 1990, and have two daughters, Hannah, 31, and Adeline, 29, and two grandchildren.
They also have two St Bernard dogs, eight alpacas, five Scottish Highland cows, eight guinea fowl, seven roosters, 50 chickens, six Toulouse geese and four ducks on their sprawling property.
“It’s definitely a menagerie,” Williams says, “but we love it.”
During her five weeks leave without pay, Williams turned to baking – in particular, sourdough, which requires a live fermented culture or starter to leaven the bread.
“I like to cook and celebrate my heritage – you never went to my mother’s house without eating something or leaving with something,” she says.
Adam and Rosa Tomaszewski were World War II refugees, he from Poland, she from East Germany, and settled in Capalaba in the 1950s where they established a farm growing strawberries, flowers, melons and tomatoes.
“With sourdough, you’ve got to think a day ahead to get you to the next day in the calendar,” Williams says.
“I had five weeks of reflecting and trying to come to grips with how stupid I was, and working out how to mentally sustain myself because for 20 years, except for Covid, I was in the office most days.”
The book Breadsong, by Kitty Tait and Al Tait, set her on her sourdough journey. It tells of how baking changed the life of a 14-year-old girl riddled with anxiety and bedridden with depression. Williams, who has sought counselling after the incident, could relate.
“Sourdough was my therapy – and 17 months on, it (the starter) is still living,” she says.
Williams’ final term as mayor has been challenging on other fronts.
“It has been everything from great joy to great sorrow,” she explains.
“Our first grandchild was born a few days before the last election in March 2020 and our second on our wedding anniversary in June 2022, but tragically my eldest brother drowned on my other brother’s farm (in Redland Bay) in September 2020.
“Richard was 18 years older than I am and lived with Robert and his wife Susan.
“He went for a walk and must have slipped – they looked for ages and didn’t realise it was him at first, they thought it was just a T-shirt floating in the dam.”
Williams says she “didn’t want to make it a public thing” at the time, trying to juggle the challenges of her role, but it cut her deeply.
It also brought home the importance of family – and of time together, time she has lost over her 20-year career in local government.
“I want to give back to my kids what was taken because of me being in public life – and being a grandmother is the best part of getting older,” Williams says.
She put her hand up for government in 2003 after fears the long-running Redland Strawberry Festival (now RedFest) would be lost.
“I was involved in the festival through my music (she is also a country singer) and the local council was playing politics with it,” she says.
“So I wanted to save it – and more broadly, I wanted to stop young people leaving the region for opportunities elsewhere.”
Looking back, Williams says she has done her “best to consolidate achievements”.
“I have focused on providing for families, including saving land from development and turning it into parkland, building more crisis accommodation for families escaping domestic violence, creating jobs through major projects such as Toondah Harbour, Weinam Creek and the rejuvenation of Capalaba CBD, and successfully lobbying the state government for better transport and access to our unique islands (Karragarra, Lamb, Russell and Macleay).”
While the Toondah Harbour housing estate, port and parkland has been controversial, with plans for it to be built on environmentally significant Ramsar wetlands, so too is the Birkdale Community Precinct. About 10ha of the 62ha development will be set aside for the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games as the whitewater venue.
Williams says post the games, it will deliver a legacy of disaster resilience training for the southern hemisphere in matters of urban flooding and drowning prevention, however questions have been raised over whether ratepayers will be left funding it into the future.
“Some people say the Olympics is a white elephant (but) no, it’s actually the only part of that Birkdale precinct that’s going to make money, it’s revenue positive,” she says.
“I’ve had to fight tooth and nail against action groups, against the government, but it’s about not listening to the vocal minority, it’s about doing what’s best for our region.”
Williams says she could “just turn up to work every day and sign letters”, but she will continue fighting for the Redlands until she hangs up her mayoral robes next year.
While she won’t be drawn on her successor, she hopes it will be someone who will “stand up for the city and not be a ‘yes minister’ mayor”.
“Hopefully, they will carry on some of the great legacy opportunities we have, including the $6bn of projects in the pipeline.
“That’s what I want to be remembered for – not that one negative incident I will forever regret and has made me an easy target.”
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