The unnamed businessman’s unspeakable act

It’s a long road to justice for a woman pursuing a businessman and racehorse owner over the abuse carried out against her as a seven-year-old.

Marita Murphy is seeking justice over what happened to her as a child.

The child rapist is a wealthy man these days, all fast cars, slow racehorses and slick lawyers. But he knows what he did when he was a teenager and now the past is reaching out for him.

After nearly 50 years, he must have counted on passing time and fading memories to bury his crime far behind.

He has run hard to distance himself from the depraved and despicable act he committed that day in 1968.

But the nuns must have taught him, be sure your sins will find you out. And they did, one day not long ago, when a child he claims he never met, now a grandmother, confronted him with a lifetime’s worth of anger for what he did to her with another youth.

Sins take some staring down, so the big shot had his pet lawyer, a mate from the same big school with answers as sharply tailored as his suit.

Young Marita and her family (Marita is the little one with her head turned).

Marita Murphy (bottom right) taking her first communion at Maryknoll in 1968.

It started out politely, of course. The gambit was to fake absolute ignorance and innocence. But when he played nice, all perplexed and concerned, she said “Don’t touch me!” and the gloves were off.

He tried to intimidate her by big noting about his connections in horse racing, she being a former stablehand married to a jockey.

He leaned across the table with his mobile telephone, and said, “Do you know who I am?”, naming a well-known Victorian figure.

She retorted: “Good, let’s ring him then.” Meaning, let’s tell him exactly what this man is accused of. She called his bluff and made him look foolish and he stalked from the room in a rage. But his lawyer couldn’t resist going the knuckle.

He jabbed his finger at the woman his client raped twice when she was seven years old and grated: “We’ll break you. We’ll take you all the way to the Supreme Court.”

It cost her $100,000 to find out he meant that. So now she’s making the rapist pay another way, in the court of public opinion.

Marita aged five.

That little girl was once Marita Elliott, now known as Marita Murphy. She was the youngest of seven surviving children in a devout Catholic family living in a tightknit church settlement, Maryknoll, near Tynong when her father died just before her seventh birthday in July, 1968.

Late that year, her mother was put in hospital for an operation. Unfortunately, as it turns out, the Catholic network farmed out the traumatised younger Elliott children.

Marita was supposed to go to a relative in Rosanna but that fell through at the last minute. She wanted to go with her brother Bill to a family friend in Kew but she had no say. As bad luck had it, she was placed with a well-meaning stranger, a close relative of a priest known to the family.

The priest wasn’t at fault. His relative’s offer was an act of Christian charity. But the good Samaritan was so keen on shows of kindness that she also opened her house to others she thought were in need, in this case a violent juvenile delinquent, a repeat offender who’d twice escaped from state boys’ homes.

When the Samaritan came to fetch Marita from her aged grandmother’s temporary care, three older boys got out of the car. (Two were 14, the other 11.) One of the older ones was the delinquent, Eugene, raised in state orphanages that were a petri dish for violence and deviance.

Marita recalls clinging to her grandmother. She had never been away from her mother and was scared. But “children were seen and not heard.” She had to go with them.

After Marita was put to bed that night, the boy she knew as Eugene crept in and put his hand over her mouth so she couldn’t call out as he molested her.

She was terrified and confused. Next morning, she was too frightened to say anything. Mrs Samaritan noticed nothing and blithely sent the little girl out to “play” with the two teenagers and the 11-year-old.

Both older boys digitally raped her. The older brother, the one who grew up to be a businessman, boasted he was going to “poke” Marita. She heard them making plans to get away from the house.

Their plan was to ride their bikes to the beach. Marita was put on the back of one of the bikes. They went to an empty block piled high with brush and junk ready to be burnt. They were going to hide behind the pile when a man appeared and set fire to it, so they moved on.

They stopped near an overpass bridge and took her underneath it. The younger boy acted as a lookout while they raped her. He looked unhappy.

That night at the dinner table, Marita blurted the truth. The appalled mother immediately arranged to send Marita to the Elliotts’ family friend in Kew, Mrs Copley.

Marita Murphy leading Colin Hayes-trained champion sprinter Papal Bull.

Marita Murphy riding Papal Bull.

When she got there, Marita didn’t say any more about the assault but she could tell that the Samaritan woman had told Mrs Copley she had been “interfered with”. When she went home later, she realised her mother also knew, although it wasn’t until 10 years later that she spoke to her about it, at which time her mother told her the woman had written a letter of apology. Her mother also told her that the Samaritan’s family had moved to South Gippsland.

The effect of the sexual assault was profound and permanent. Whereas Marita’s older siblings were good students, launching successful careers, she was a problem child. So while her oldest brother graduated from engineering at Melbourne University, Marita was moved from one school to another. By 13, she was out of the classroom forever.

She liked ponies and started working at a local trail ride business. Then, aged 15, she went to work for Caulfield horse trainer Brian Courtney.

It was the beginning of a seemingly better time that took her to Western Australia and later, to work in racing in the USA and Canada. But she could never shake off the shock, unease and festering anger at what had happened to her seven-year-old self.

The fun-loving, apparently carefree and spirited young horsewoman in fact held up a mask to the world to hide the darkness beneath.

And that’s how it would be for half a lifetime.

In 1985, at 23, she married Garry Murphy, one of Victoria’s most respected jockeys, and they built a life together with four children near his hometown of Ballarat. She had told him what had happened to her in 1968 and they rarely spoke of it again, at least for more than 30 years.

It was as if Marita — the busy wife and mother, jockey manager and horse trainer — was holding her breath. But when her mother died in 2008, something changed. She realised she’d been so reluctant to burden her mother with guilt that she had buried the unspeakable deep inside, and now the psychic wound was festering.

Marita Murphy riding at Gulfstream Park in Florida in 1984.

The world was changing. A rising tide of revelations of child sexual abuse by priests, teachers, sports coaches, scout masters and relatives turned into investigations of institutions and individuals.

One day Marita Murphy, 53, went to Ballarat police to report what had happened to Marita Elliott at seven. The police did what they could, which wasn’t much.

In the new climate of supporting and expressing belief in victims, no one wanted to state the brutal truth that the uncorroborated memories of a seven-year-old were never going to swing a criminal trial.

The police at least confirmed a chain of contemporaneous corroboration: that Marita’s mother had told other family members about the attack after getting a letter from the Samaritan mother admitting what had happened.

With a criminal prosecution stillborn, Marita decided on civil action, with its lower standard of proof. The short version of a gruelling chain of events is that she insisted on taking her attacker to court, imagining she might get justice.

What she got was a $120,000 costs order against her. She wrote a cheque to the rapist for $100,000.10, the proceeds of selling a home unit that was her retirement fund.

After three weeks, he hadn’t cashed it. She sent him a message to the effect, “If you think that by not cashing it you’ll buy my silence, you’re wrong.”

Marita Murphy pursued civil action in the case.

He cashed the cheque. Marita turned up the heat. She traced Eugene Lovett, the other rapist, a lifetime offender living in Collingwood on the wrong side of the law.

She hired a filmmaker and was covertly filmed meeting Lovett in Smith St where dealers loiter. She then persuaded him to be filmed confirming her version of events and, eventually, signing documents that would strengthen her case against the state — and against the other key offender, the older son who had become a businessman and racehorse owner.

The film was finished in May and premiered in the Regent Cinema in Ballarat. It is called You Be The Judge: the Marita Murphy Story. But when she sends links to it, as she has to people all over the world, the catchline is “raped and robbed”.

In the first month, 2000 people watched it, and the audience is growing every week. Many viewers are overseas, which explains why American radio stations and podcasters have interviewed Marita in recent weeks. She has built credibility because her story is included in a #metoo book of survivors’ stories, You Are Not Alone, published in New York in 2018.

Marita’s story has more traction in America than it does here but that could soon change.

Eugene Lovett died last year but his signed and filmed testimony about his co-offender is in a lawyer’s hands.

The unnamed businessman in this dark story knows who he is; so do a growing number of people who can form their own conclusions about him.

But what of his little brother, the one made to keep watch as they raped a little girl? Disturbed by the crime, you might think, he later went completely off the rails — becoming a lying, thieving gambling addict who embezzled a massive amount to play poker machines, and went to jail.

Justice being blind, it got the wrong brother. Now karma is taking a shot.

Originally published as The unnamed businessman’s unspeakable act