Margaret Cunneen: ‘If you want to assassinate me, don’t miss’
As one of the country’s most high-profile prosecutors, and the woman who inspired TV character Janet King, top silk Margaret Cunneen’s new career move to the ‘other side’ is almost unthinkable.
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She has earned a formidable reputation as a champion for the rights of sexual-assault victims and taken on some of the country’s most notorious criminals.
And as the inspiration for the character played by Marta Dusseldorp in popular ABC legal drama Janet King, top silk Margaret Cunneen SC has been such a high-profile prosecutor that her new career move is almost unthinkable.
She has swapped sides.
Last week, Cunneen moved into her new job at the private bar and will soon represent the kind of crooks she once helped lock up. She knows the role may surprise some — after all, as a Crown prosecutor, her only client has until now been the Queen.
But, she points out, the law is never black and white.
“Otherwise you wouldn’t need barristers,” Cunneen tells Stellar.
“If my client instructs me that he or she isn’t guilty, then I am ethically obliged to act on his or her instructions.
“Even though someone is accused of a heinous crime, it’s not my position or the position of anyone other than the jury to come to the final determination of guilt. Everyone deserves a fair trial.”
She may not have worked as a defence counsel before, but she knows about being falsely accused.
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In 2015 she became the woman who dismantled the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) after its head Megan Latham — also her former colleague — very publicly accused her of perverting the course of justice over a car accident involving the then-girlfriend of the oldest of Cunneen’s three sons.
Equally publicly, Cunneen took on the ICAC in the NSW Court of Appeal and the High Court — and won when a ruling found the commission was wrong and had no power to investigate her. Criminal charges were never laid, the ICAC has since had a makeover and Latham returned to the Supreme Court bench.
“If you want to assassinate me, then don’t miss,” warns Cunneen.
At one stage her boss, NSW Director of Public Prosecutions Lloyd Babb SC, summoned her to his office over private, years-old text messages in which a journalist criticised his courtroom style and Cunneen replied. It was drama worthy of a TV script.
Standing up for herself only made Cunneen more powerful.
Both political parties came knocking on her door, impressed by her resilience and ability to manage her own PR and intrigued by the “legend” of an attractive, blonde, female prosecutor with a black belt in taekwondo who drove a yellow convertible Mustang. (For the record, she is not entering politics.)
“Look, it wasn’t a death in the family or anything like that,” she says of the ordeal.
“It was perfectly obvious that it was certainly driven by emotion. I stayed devoid of emotion and because I have such a cohesive supportive family and group of close friends it couldn’t really affect the core of my life.”
And she is adamant the saga had nothing to do with the new direction her life is taking. Aside from her need for a change, public-service superannuation rules dictate that if Cunneen stays in the same job any longer, she will lose money.
On the same day she began studying law in 1977, Cunneen started work as a legal clerk in the NSW Public Service to help pay for her education.
In 1986, she became a senior solicitor handling child sexual-assault cases, working under Megan Latham. Four years later, she would be named a Crown prosecutor.
She famously prosecuted notorious paedophiles Robert (Dolly) Dunn, Philip Bell and Colin Fisk. In Dunn’s case, she persuaded the judge to admit videos taken by Dunn of his abuse of numerous victims, some of them as young as seven.
But it was her work prosecuting a series of gang-rape attacks in Sydney in 2000 that shot her to prominence.
Outside court after a verdict was handed down, including a 31-year jail sentence for ringleader Bilal Skaf, she put her arm around a victim who had been raped and assaulted by 14 men over the course of six hours.
Trying to divert attention from the woman — who had been in the witness box for a week and was known only as Miss C — Cunneen told reporters: “I commend the quality of the police investigation and the fortitude of the victim.”
In 2002 she gave a lecture to law students in which she argued that some in the criminal law had become obsessed with helping offenders avoid jail by finding minor loopholes to appeal jury decisions.
The Court of Criminal Appeal came down on her like a ton of bricks, banning her from prosecuting in a retrial after courts had quashed some of the convictions in the gang-rape case. Miss C couldn’t go on without Cunneen’s support, and that was that.
Yet the judicial opprobrium only buttressed her legacy. In 2012 and 2014, while Commissioner of the Special Commission of Inquiry into the cover-up of child abuse in the Catholic diocese of Maitland-Newcastle, Cunneen was known to step down from the bench and hug some of the men severely traumatised by the reliving their sexual abuse as boys.
Whatever side she acts for, prosecution or defence, she has an enduring faith in juries getting it right.
“Juries are the symbol of democracy. They are the way the public has a direct say in the criminal justice system,” she tells Stellar.
“They are also a wonderful mixture of different sexes, races and religions.”
Despite the nature of her work, Cunneen doesn’t take things too seriously.
“I think it comes from Girl Guide training,” she says.
“You had to learn Girl Guide laws and the one that resounds with me is that ‘a guide has courage and is cheerful through all difficulties’. Everyone’s life is sometimes hard but I believe you have a duty to be positive and happy while you go about your daily life.”
And don’t bother asking if gender ever held her back.
She shrugs off a description of her in a book about the gang rapes as being an “industrial strength flirt”, and is not into quotas.
“Even the most antediluvian men don’t now think that women can’t be as able lawyers,” she says.
“Maybe 40 years ago, but not now.”
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Originally published as Margaret Cunneen: ‘If you want to assassinate me, don’t miss’
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