’Meritless and scurrilous nonsense’: Trevor Jenkins’ ‘ramblings’ revealed

A 150 page document published by Supreme Court Justice Stephen Southwood during the week outlined the full extent of the “incoherent and irrelevant ramblings” that saw Jenkins declared the NT’s first vexatious litigant last year.

‘Rubbish Warrior’ Trevor Jenkins with his sculpture of three judges jerking each other off which was denied entry into the Supreme Court art show.

SERIAL pest and self-styled “rubbish warrior” Trevor Jenkins twice stripped naked during court appearances, lied about his mother’s death and used the Territory justice system as a “method of punishing and bullying those who did not give him what he wanted”.

Those findings are contained in a 150 page document published by Supreme Court Justice Stephen Southwood this week outlining the full extent of the “incoherent and irrelevant ramblings” that saw Jenkins declared the NT’s first vexatious litigant last year.

In handing down his decision, Justice Southwood ruled Jenkins was “motivated by a bizarre and querulous quest for a personal vision of justice to which all else is subordinated” in launching 72 vexatious proceedings in NT courts.

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Justice Southwood found Jenkins repeatedly “tried to institute proceedings by filing incoherent, illegible and unhygienic material at the Supreme Court and Local Court registries”.

The document also reveals the disputes which saw Jenkins barred from bringing virtually all future court action include an attempt to obtain an Ochre Card so he could work as an NTFL umpire and a counter prosecution of a priest who he had assaulted.

A partial transcript of Jenkins’ “incoherent and discursive rambling and agitated and vituperative gabbling” included in the document reveals he saw himself as a “Northern Territory legend” and ”prophet within the church for poor people”.

“I went to do an [Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults] course with a catholic priest, I pushed past [him], and now he’s charging me with assault. So I charged him with assault.”

THE RUBBISH WARRIOR V DARWIN CITY COUNCIL

In April 2016, Jenkins was convicted on two counts of littering in contravention of Darwin city bylaws.

The conviction was recorded in his absence after he didn’t show up to court because the bus was late and he’d been “campaigning around Casuarina".

Jenkins also failed to appear on six of the seven occasions his appeal was listed in the Local Court and Chief Justice Michael Grant later found it had “no merit”.

“The notice of appeal filed is indecipherable in parts and contains scandalous accusations,” Chief Justice Grant ruled.

“The respondent’s oral submissions were irrelevant and ‘attended by allegations of harassment, legal and political corruption, persecution and malicious prosecution … unsupported by even a scintilla of evidence’.”

During the hearing that would ultimately decide whether Jenkins would be declared a vexatious litigant, he had this to say:

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“I was doing sculpture on the side of the road in Smith Street. So build a sculpture, so I am well-known as — the tourist channel plays a video of me, where people come and see me doing sculptures. So people come to Darwin, take my photo, organise myself. That’s how get paid and that’s how I live and that’s my personality, who I am, okay. So the council knows that. The council benefits from that. I work for them for free to do Homeless Connect. They use me on all those things.

“Then they come around and the rangers and the people who are working within the security system are then being told, “Go out there. He is doing this. He’s building this. Take a photo. Okay, he’s putting — he took rubbish out of a bin and he made that, so therefore it was a littering thing.” Now, other people would go, “Okay, don’t worry about that. Just pay a fine dah, dah, dah.” The problem is with that that if I’m trying to have a career and I’m trying to do things and trying to do things for art and freedom of speech, which I feel strongly about that has to have a voice.”

THE OCHRE CARD

In 2012, Jenkins applied to the NT Screening Authority for an Ochre Card that would clear him to work with children, allowing him to work as an NTFL boundary umpire.

When the application was rejected, Jenkins embarked on a total of 15 proceedings in the Local and Supreme Courts disputing the decision on grounds including that he is “not a paedophile” and the “complaint children [and] police colluded”.

Justice Southwood found “it was not suggested that [Jenkins] had committed any offences involving children” and the grounds for that appeal were “scandalous and had no reasonable prospects of success”.

“[Jenkins] deliberately chose not to try to establish that he was a suitable candidate for

a clearance notice,” he wrote.

“Instead, he chose to pursue a false conspiracy theory against the police and (SAFE NT) because he believed that as a result of his homeless status he had been mistreated.”

THE WRITE STUFF

In September 2017, Jenkins instigated a private prosecution against NT Library assistant director and 2014 NT Literary Awards organiser Emma Derby for an unnamed offence.

Ms Derby had drawn Jenkins’ ire after his entry for the awards was rejected and he was not invited to the presentation ceremony.

Jenkins launched the proceedings against Ms Derby — and various security and other staff at Parliament House where the awards were being held — after he turned up anyway and

refused to leave, assaulted a security guard and was ultimately arrested and removed from the building.

During the vexatious litigant hearings, Jenkins made the following submission on the incident:

“ Now people are telling me that I couldn’t come there when I come every year to the literary awards. I’m a writer. I couldn’t even present that I was a writer. I couldn’t even present that I was a writer and [Local Court judge] Alan Woodcock goes, “You’re not even a writer.”

Justice Southwood found Jenkins “maliciously laid false criminal charges against all of the above persons … out of spite” and each of the prosecutions “constituted a gross abuse of process”.

“They were instituted for a wrongful purpose, namely to harass and cause detriment to each of the defendants who were completely innocent of all of the matters alleged against them,” he wrote.

“The respondent deliberately and knowingly, falsely laid very serious criminal charges to harass and cause detriment to the above named persons who were all utterly blameless and were performing their duties to the best of their ability with the utmost integrity and decency.”

The court documents quote a 2017 ruling by Chief Justice Michael Grant which states: “[Jenkins] has been medically assessed on a number of occasions and those assessments have concluded that he has a personality disorder rather than a diagnosable mental illness.”

“He is not an exceptional person,” Justice Southwood ruled this week.

“He is a person with a personality disorder who deliberately and of his own choosing made a

very serious nuisance of himself for far too long.”

Jenkins was jailed for contempt of court in both the Local and Supreme Courts and stripped naked while appearing in each jurisdiction.

“Hello, my name is Trevor Jenkins and I’m here defending myself in a vexation litigation. I don’t use computers because they hurt my eyes and destroy my retinas and they create cancer, so I won’t use computers, so I want that taken into account when you’re saying I am vexatious and hand write documents, because I — you know, that’s the way it is.

“I — I have — a genius IQ of over 220. So I write, I paint, I sing, I play guitar. I do all those things at a rate that other people don’t. So when Kelly J said something like, “He is the lowest of the low”, I am not. I am the highest of the high. I understand what I’m doing. I going to those places to live like that Francis of Assisi or artists to be able to understand the system and work at that level to see what the problems are. That is what I do. I’m a bonus to the system.

“That’s the way it’s been with reformers having to take a case which shows up the problems. The Salvation Army, William Bramble, in the 1870s I think, he took a young girl and said -procured her as, like, a sexual slave and then got arrested to show that there was child prostitution because no one believed child prostitution exists. So he was prepared to do that to show the system. Is that an abuse of the system? No, I don’t think so, you know. And Trevor Jenkins is the same.

“I think you got the spelling wrong, okay. C-o-u-r-a-g-o-s (sic) is what I am, not v-e-x-a-t-i-o-s (sic), you know. You’ve got the wrong situation. You’ve got the wrong person, you know.

“It’s not that I’m crazy. I’m an artist and I really care about people and I’m a Christian. That is why I live my cases. Now, that’s got nothing to do — I’ve read right through this. I’ve read it, I read it back to front. No, I’m not vexatious. It’s got nothing to do with vexatious. I’m not trying to hurt anybody. I’m trying to make the world a better place and I can’t see how I’m dragging people through things.”