‘It’s horrible’: Lawyer Jen Robinson on the toughest part of working for Assange

This story is part of the October 15 edition of Good Weekend.See all 17 stories.

Wrapped in a camel coat against the autumn chill, a small, determined figure walks across a concrete plaza and disappears through a set of imposing glass security doors. It’s a bright September day in The Hague, and Australian human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson has come to the seat of government in the Netherlands to deliver a complaint to the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) Office of the Prosecutor.

The complaint refers to the killing of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was shot in the head on May 11 while covering an Israeli raid in Jenin on the West Bank. It’s alleged she was killed by a bullet fired by an Israeli sniper, and Robinson’s filing is part of a bigger case in which it is argued that Israeli security forces have systematically targeted Palestinian journalists in violation of international humanitarian law.

Outside the court, Nasser Abu Bakr, president of the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, tells me about Robinson’s advocacy. “When we talked about bringing these cases to the ICC, some people said, ‘This is bullshit; it is a dream for you,’ ” he says. “Today this dream is a fact because of the great support Jen gave us. In four months, she knew every single bone of our case.” The dead journalist’s brother Anton stands beside Abu Bakr, his face a mask of deep sadness: “This is what Jennifer is doing – giving my family hope,” he tells me.

The day prior to her appearance at the ICC, 41-year-old Robinson had been in Geneva to address the UN Human Rights Council on the arbitrary detention of journalists in Hong Kong. Two days later, she was back there to address the UN’s working group on enforced and involuntary disappearances on behalf of Noel Zihabamwe, an Australian citizen from Rwanda whose two brothers disappeared after being abducted by Rwandan police in 2019.

If life was giving you a hard time, you’d want Jennifer Robinson on your side. She held actor Amber Heard’s hand outside court during Johnny Depp’s 2020 libel case against Britain’s The Sun newspaper, and sat beside Heard in a black cab as a crowd pressed at the windows, screaming abuse. Heard has called Robinson the “smartest person in the room” and the “most treasured asset in my life”.

Robinson with Anton Abu Akleh, brother of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, and colleague Tatyana Eatwell at the ICC.Credit: Courtesy of Jennifer Robinson

Robinson has been Julian Assange’s go-to legal adviser and constant support since 2010, when he released 250,000 secret US diplomatic cables, causing a global furore. These days, the WikiLeaks founder remains in a high-security jail, awaiting the outcome of a final appeal against a US extradition request to face espionage charges.

She has represented exiled West Papuan leader Benny Wenda for 20 years, standing by his side at podiums around the world advocating for his homeland’s independence from Indonesia. And when British Asian off-spin bowler Azeem Rafiq found himself overwhelmed by the struggle to prove claims of racism against his former team, Yorkshire County Cricket Club, he called Robinson.

Rafiq eventually got a six-figure payout from the club, which was followed with a £25 million (about $44 million) pledge from the England and Wales Cricket Board to tackle racism throughout the game. “After five minutes on the phone with Jen, I knew I would be able to sleep that night,” he says. “Her humanity and grace is something I will treasure all my life.”

This, then, is the country girl who grew up in Berry on the NSW South Coast, went to the local public school, Bomaderry High, and admits to experiencing imposter syndrome in the early years of her career. Much like the protagonist in Suzie Miller’s play Prima Facie – still wowing audiences in digital screenings of live performances around the UK – Robinson’s family had little money and no connections to law, and she worked three jobs to get through her undergraduate law degree at Australian National University (ANU).

“Imposter syndrome is not just in your head, it’s real,” she tells me. “It’s about gender and class, and there are real, structural reasons why people from backgrounds like mine feel out of place.”

We’re talking over green tea at the ancient Randolph Hotel in the English university city of Oxford. Robinson came here on a Rhodes Scholarship in 2006. She’d warned ahead of our meeting, “you’ll spot my surf hair” and indeed, her usually smooth blonde bob is having an unruly moment. Dressed in jeans and sneakers, she’s come here from The Wave, an artificial surf pool near Bristol. “I’d been longing to try it,” she says, her beaming face free of make-up.

The eldest of six children – two of whom her father had with his second wife – her mother was a teacher, and Jennifer could read and write before she went to school. “I got my commitment to education from Mum and a commitment to excellence from my dad,” she says. “His motto is, ‘You can always do better.’ ”

Terry Robinson had followed his father, legendary horse trainer Kevin, into racing. “When we still had trotters, he’d pick me up from school in the horse truck on a Friday and we’d drive up to Sydney’s Harold Park. I’d strap the horse for him, watch him race, then we’d go back. He’d have three hours’ sleep before riding beach trackwork. He still does it at 67.”

She pulls out her phone to show me a photo of horses galloping on Seven Mile Beach, near Berry, in the glow of sunrise. “It’s my favourite sound in the world: the rhythm of horses’ hooves on the sand and the surf in the background.”

Robinson with father Terry in 2011. “I got my commitment to education from my mother, and a commitment to excellence from my dad.” Credit: Adam Wright

We walk across the road to the Oxford college where, as a Rhodes scholar, Robinson took civil law and a master’s in international public law. Balliol is one of the dreamiest of dreaming spires and an elite one, in the upper reaches of the academic tables. “It’s also known as progressive and lefty,” she says, “though Boris Johnson was here, so probably not a good example.

“In Australia, people always ask where you went to school – here they ask, ‘Oxford or Cambridge?’ And then, ‘Which college?’ When I say ‘Balliol’, they’re thinking, ‘Ooh, interesting, an Australian.’ They’re confused and trying to place you.”

“Then he said, ‘In the 1970s we let women in, so look around you, fellows, you could be sitting next to your future wife.’ I thought, ‘What are we, marriage fodder?’ ”

We enter the lofty dining hall, where oil portraits of robed men are interspersed with group photographs of female alumnae. “Those are new,” says Robinson of the photos. “When I was here there were none, only old white men. At my coming-up dinner in 2006, the vice-regent talked about all the famous Balliol men: Nobel Prize winners, prime ministers, the crème de la crème. Then he said, ‘In the 1970s we let women in, so look around you, fellows, you could be sitting next to your future wife.’ I thought, ‘What are we, marriage fodder?’ ”

Even so, she loved her time here. “It was so beautiful and such a massive privilege,” she says. “We had world leaders passing through, a concentration of intellect. And I had a wonderful group of friends, the brightest kids from around the world.”

She admits later that she suffered depression during her studies and took a term off to go home. “It was partly the pressure. I didn’t know how I would live up to being a scholar. Before I came, someone wise told me, ‘Oxford will be the best and the worst time of your life.’ I didn’t understand that until I got here.”

Robinson welcoming West Papuan freedom fighter Benny Wenda, wife Maria and their first child to London in 2003. Credit: Courtesy of Jennifer Robinson

By the time Robinson was at Oxford, Benny Wenda, his wife Maria and their first child were safely in the UK, thanks in large part to the Balliol scholar, who would successfully deal with their asylum requests and citizenship applications. Robinson had met Wenda in Indonesia in 2002 as part of her ANU studies. He was in jail after being arrested for leading an independence rally and she’d come across him shackled in a courtroom.

She takes me to meet the Wendas at their home in Oxford, where she’s seen their six children grow up. There’s laughter as they recall the day in 2007 when Maria asked Robinson if she could look after the children because she had to go out. Benny had been unable to help – he’d had surgery on his leg, broken in a bombing raid by Indonesia when he was young, and couldn’t walk.

“Maria had never asked me to help before,” says Robinson. “It turned out she was in labour and I didn’t even know she was pregnant!” Robinson moved in for a term: “I would take the kids to school, then get on my bike and go to classes, then come back for tea and bath time.” Maria nods: “She just came in like an angel!”

Robinson continues to work pro bono for Wenda and his push for West Papua’s right to self-determination, a 60-year struggle. “People say to me, ‘Why do you go on?’ ” she says. “‘It will never happen.’ But there is a concentrated, international legal effort. It is expensive, so we have to fundraise.” She gave a TEDxSydney address, Courage is Contagious, in 2013. “That produced a lot of support.”

While still at Balliol, Robinson was approached by another Australian lawyer who’d been a Rhodes scholar, Geoffrey Robertson, to help him with research. It included travelling the world interviewing survivors of the 1988 prisons massacre in Iran – thousands of political prisoners were thought to have been summarily executed – and advising Mauritius on media law reform.

“I spent [so much] time at Oxford doing pro bono work on human rights cases and working for Geoff that my academic supervisor said I should just crack on with being a lawyer because I was clearly more interested in case work than academic research,” she says. They continued working together after she joined London solicitors Finers Stephens Innocent, including collaborating on a case against the Catholic Church over child sex abuse.

In 2010, when a major WikiLeaks exposure of America’s military secrets emerged, the pair agreed that their fellow Australian Julian Assange might soon need their help. They were right, though not for the reasons they expected. In September that year, after Assange was accused of sexually assaulting two women in Sweden (which he denied), he contacted Robertson’s Doughty Street Chambers. Two months later, WikiLeaks released the first batch of 250,000 classified US diplomatic cables, leading to global headlines.

Robinson with Julian Assange, centre, after he was granted bail in 2010, and Geoffrey Robertson, second from right.Credit: Getty Images

From then on, Robinson would be in constant touch with Assange, during his stay in rural East Anglia on bail and in 2012, when he claimed asylum at London’s Ecuadorian embassy to avoid the threat of extradition to Sweden. When asked by journalists how her feminist principles sat with defending a client accused of rape, she always gave the same answer: “Everyone deserves a defence.”

Robertson’s Doughty Street colleague Helena Kennedy interviewed Assange with Robinson while he was on bail. “Assange is a very difficult man,” she tells me, “and there eventually came a period when people in his inner team were peeling away from him. He had a serious falling-out with Mark Stephens, the senior lawyer with whom Robinson was working. At that moment, she could have easily decided that her future lay with being nice to her superior and casting Assange adrift, but she didn’t do that. She behaved in an honourable way and also – this is one of her many skills – managed to keep her friendship with Mark.”

Assange remained in the embassy for seven years, convinced that the Swedish case was a pretext for his eventual extradition to the US. He received regular visits from Robinson and a stream of high-profile supporters, including Lady Gaga. In May 2017, Sweden’s director of public prosecutions dropped the assault case, but a year later Assange was arrested inside Ecuador’s embassy on a charge of breaching bail. He was convicted and sent to Belmarsh Prison. His initial sentence was for 50 weeks, but he has been imprisoned there for three-and-a-half years while extradition proceedings continue. His fellow inmates include serial rapists and murderers.

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Outside the monstrous grey walls of Belmarsh, trees are hung with tattered yellow ribbons bearing the message “Free Julian Assange”. I wait in the Belmarsh visitors’ centre for Robinson, who is inside meeting Assange. She emerges, a slight figure in a red dress among a bunch of dark-suited lawyers who, like her, have been visiting clients. “We queue up,” she explains. “I walk past the legal meeting rooms containing people convicted of heinous crimes, and then there is Julian, winner of the Sydney Peace Prize and a Walkley award for outstanding journalism, with his copies of The Economist and the London Review of Books.”

On each visit she takes him a KitKat, a tangerine and a coffee, and reports on progress and setbacks. “He told me he hadn’t seen his family for six months,” she says. [Assange, now 51, has two sons with his wife, Stella Moris.] “Then, when they came, he wasn’t allowed to touch his children. They’re stealing his life. He has a terrible depressive illness – how could you not?”

Robinson, pictured with Assange in 2011, calls the Australian government’s lack of action to free him “a shame on our country”.Credit: Getty Images

Does she get upset when she can’t bring him any comfort? “It’s horrible. We are both Australians – I feel awful telling him about bushwalks and going to the beach, things he really misses but still wants to hear about. It’s heartbreaking.” Could his own country protect him? “Absolutely Australia could be negotiating with the US about this. [Prime Minister] Anthony Albanese made positive statements in opposition – saying it was time for it to end – so we hope there will be a change now. It requires political action from the Australian government. It’s a shame on our country.”

She calls a taxi. Waiting for its arrival, we sit on a bench in the warm London sunshine, and chat. It seems she’s spent more time in Australia of late, I say, in part thanks to the pandemic.

“It’s horrible. We are both Australians – I feel awful telling him about bushwalks and going to the beach, things he really misses but still wants to hear about. It’s heartbreaking.”

She nods. “I’ve loved being at home! Julian’s case came so early in my career and was so compelling and so unjust it kept me here in England – that and the work that spun from it. But now, in this remotely connected world, I’ve done court hearings from Smiths Beach [in Western Australia’s Margaret River]. That was not a possibility pre-COVID and now it is entirely possible to split my time between the UK and Australia. I can work on cases of international significance and still spend time with my family.”

With some trepidation, because she’s always refused to talk about her personal life, I remark that everyone seems to know she spent months of lockdown in WA. “I had the privilege of spending time in WA,” she says evenly, “living at Smiths Beach during lockdown, and travelled around in a ’60s caravan spending time in Esperance and Exmouth and Denmark, staying in caravan parks and surfing. It was such freedom, like reconnecting with childhood holidays.”

I let that one go through to the keeper, then later she emails me to confirm: “I don’t speak about my private life.”

Robinson with Keina Yoshida, her co-author on the book “How Many More Women?“. Credit: Kate Peters

Robinson turned 40 during the pandemic; lockdown gave her time to write a book, How Many More Women?, which is out next week. Over a year, she and her co-author, fellow human rights lawyer and former Doughty Street Chambers colleague Keina Yoshida, listened via Zoom to stories from survivors of sexual assault, the journalists who wrote about them and feminist activists around the world. They heard story after shocking story about how defamation and privacy law is wielded by “rich and powerful men” to silence women who speak out – and about how those women, even when their claims are vindicated, are further abused by vicious online trolling.

Robinson says the idea for the book had been brewing for some time. “I’d observed defamation cases being filed,” she says, “watched the backlash to #MeToo – you’d be amazed how much goes on that never breaks the surface, that is resolved confidentially and never makes it to court. The result is often that the women are prevented from ever telling their story.

“I could defend these cases to the end of my career, but the needle on the dial wouldn’t shift. We need a bigger conversation and telling a story is an entry to empathy: those women we talked to had such resilience, I wish we could get them all in a room together.”

Johnny Depp lost his 2020 defamation case against The Sun because the judge believed his ex-wife’s account of the abuse she suffered at his hands. That didn’t stop Depp’s supporters attacking Heard and the lawyer standing beside her. “I had never faced anything like it before,” writes Robinson, “the trolling was relentless. Everything from my ethics and professionalism to my appearance and my personal relationship history was attacked. Trolls vowed to ‘ruin’ me and make sure I never worked again because … [We] had proven Depp was a wife-beater.” (In a separate trial in the US this year, a jury found that Heard had defamed Depp in describing herself as a victim of domestic abuse in an 2018 opinion essay for The Washington Post.)

With Amber Heard in 2020. Both women faced “relentless trolling” during the defamation case filed by Johnny Depp.Credit: Getty Images

When it came to writing the book, Robinson was in WA, Yoshida in Madrid, ready to go: “We did most of the interviews together,” Yoshida tells me, “and we talked almost every day. I would often be walking in the Retiro, Jen would be on the beach and I could hear the sea breaking in the background as we discussed the stories.”

One of the most egregious of them concerns a young Japanese journalist, Shiori Ito. In 2015, Ito met up with Noriyuki Yamaguchi, a well-connected media boss in Tokyo, to discuss a job opportunity. Five days later, she walked into a police station to allege she’d been raped in a hotel room by Yamaguchi while she was unconscious. She was eventually told there was not enough evidence for a prosecution.

In 2017, she went public, calling on police to reopen the investigation and bringing attention to the ways in which Japan’s criminal justice system was failing. A public backlash followed, during which Ito was accused of political motivation (Yamaguchi was close friends with the then prime minister, Shinzo Abe). At the same time, Yamaguchi filed a defamation claim against her. Ito countersued, arguing it was defamatory for him to allege she was making up the accusation. She produced CCTV footage that showed him carrying her, evidently unconscious, into the hotel.

Japanese journalist Shiori Ito went public when the investigation into her sexual assault was dropped.Credit: Getty Images

In 2019, Ito won damages in her civil suit, with the court dismissing his ¥130 million (about $1.4 million) claim against her. The court found she had been “forced to have sex without contraception, while in a state of unconsciousness and severe inebriation”. The country’s supreme court dismissed Yamaguchi’s appeal and awarded Ito ¥3.3 million (about $35,000) in damages, and partially recognised defamation by Ito, awarding Yamaguchi ¥550,000 (about $6000).

The trolling Ito receives is so bad that she has a team of checkers to go through her social media for her. She has successfully sued critics and tweeters for libel, and is campaigning to make the internet a safer space and to reform Japan’s sexual offences laws.

This sounds exhausting, I say to Robinson. She nods. “But it’s important to grapple with these issues. There are women organising, campaigning, litigating and fighting back. We want their stories to inspire more women to see they aren’t alone, that they have options and that legal change is possible.”

Robinson and her grandmother joined Australia’s March4Justice in early 2021, where Cracknell grumbled, “I can’t believe I’m still protesting about this shit.”

The book was in part inspired by her maternal grandmother, Philipa Cracknell, now 85, who ran women’s refuges in Sydney in the 1980s. “I remember the rule,” says Robinson. ” ‘Never, never answer the front door.’ That was because violent men would be trying to find the women and children. We’ve been talking recently and I’ve learnt so much about her own experience of abuse before she left my grandfather, and how that motivated her to help women, how she trained police in responding to domestic violence. I said, ‘At what point in my legal career did you not think to tell me?’ She said, ‘You didn’t ask.’ ”

Robinson and her grandmother joined Australia’s March4Justice in early 2021, where Cracknell grumbled, “I can’t believe I’m still protesting about this shit.”

“We took my little sister Matilda with us,” recalls Robinson. “She’s 13, and I remember the look on her face when women were asked to put up their hands if they were a survivor. My grandmother put up her hand, but so did most of the women there. It was as if Matilda clocked it just there, a dawning realisation. It was a powerful moment.”

Robinson with sister Matilda and gran Philipa Cracknell, a survivor of abuse, at 2021’s March4Justice.Credit: Courtesy of Jennifer Robinson

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The journey from the badlands of Belmarsh takes an age but finally the cab pulls up outside the tall Georgian façade of 54 Doughty Street, the chambers founded in 1990 for the protection of civil liberties, and Robinson’s workplace since she qualified for the English bar in 2016. Doughty Street lawyers are the rock stars of the human rights scene and, in retrospect, it was inevitable that Robinson would join them. But before she did, along with her great friend Amal Clooney, she made what seemed to some a sideways, if not backwards, move.

Celebrating Assange’s 40th birthday in 2011, she got talking to a man who turned out to be a philanthropist with deep pockets. “He said, ‘There should be more lawyers like you in the world,’ and I said, ‘Let me tell you why there aren’t.’ And I went on a rant about uni debt, educational privilege, access to networks and mentors. At the end he said, ‘I need a global legal champion and I think you’re going to be it. Come and see me next week.’ ”

Goodness, I say, it’s a fairy story. “It is,” she replies, “though lots of people said it was bonkers to step off the path I was on. But I was leaving my law firm anyway, and I thought, ‘Why be one human rights lawyer when I could create opportunities for many?’ ”

In 2011, Robinson became director of legal advocacy at the Bertha Foundation, a South Africa-based social justice organisation founded by the philanthropist she’d met that night, Tony Tabatznik. “We supported the case against stop-and-frisk litigation [in New York] and that racist law was overturned,” Robinson tells me. “We funded litigation against the CIA’s drone strikes in Pakistan. I made decisions about where to put money, which cases and campaigns to support.”

By the time she began her pupillage at Doughty Street, says her mentor Helena Kennedy, Robinson was thoroughly versed in international human rights. “Jen is a very clever, capable lawyer and enormously hardworking. She is also very bonny and that can mean having to work even harder to persuade people you’re a serious person, that you can be both smart and gorgeous. Sometimes she knew men would be assessing her on her looks rather than her acumen.

“There’s often a leeriness about women pushing to do the demanding cases, but no one thinks anything of men being ambitious.”

“She’s ambitious, and that’s another thing: there’s often a leeriness about women pushing to do the demanding cases, but no one thinks anything of men being ambitious.”

Robinson is on the board of the Grata Fund in Australia, a not-for-profit doing similar work to the Bertha Foundation. Its founding director, Isabelle Reinecke, says, “We needed an A-team of heavy-hitters and, with her
international profile, Jen was an obvious choice.”

The two met at Bambini Trust restaurant, a haunt for Sydney lawyers. “She ordered champagne and said, ‘Now tell me everything.’ She got it right away and said, ‘I’m in 100 per cent.’ She comes to board meetings after she’s been for a surf and is the least puffed-up person in the room.”

Robinson seems to be getting her feet into the sand in Australia pretty thoroughly. She does not practise as a barrister in Australia but takes on international cases through her London chambers: “I am committing part of my practice to climate change issues and part to First Nations justice.”

On behalf of Vanuatu, she is referring developed countries to the International Court of Justice on the basis that they’re not committing enough to the reduction of global warming. “It raises fundamental existential questions,” she says. “These island countries have contributed so little to climate change and suffer so much.”

She’s also working on the case of David Dungay, the 26-year-old Dunghutti man who died in custody in Sydney’s Long Bay jail in 2015 after being held down by guards. “He is Australia’s George Floyd. I’ve taken a UN Human Rights Committee case on behalf of his mother Leetona Dungay against Australia for failure to prosecute prison officers responsible for Aboriginal deaths in custody.”

“I am committing part of my practice to climate change issues and part to First Nations justice,” says Robinson, who is working on several cases closer to home.Credit: John Davis

She would like to know more about First Nations history. “For example, my dad’s horse farm is known as Mount Coolangatta,” she says. “That mountain [across the road] was the centre of our lives, you could always see it from wherever you were, but I didn’t know it was actually called Cullunghutti and is a sacred place. There was a building near my school which I’d driven past a thousand times but had no idea what it was. I now know that it was a residential home where children of the Stolen Generations were brought. Why were we not taught these things? Why was this not part of the conversation?”

She’s working on re-educating herself, sitting down with land council leaders, and last year teamed up with RebLaw, a group of young lawyers working on First Nations advocacy around the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

Three years ago, Professional Footballers Australia asked Robinson to assist in preparing a claim against FIFA for equal prize money for women players in the world cup. “The difference between the men’s and women’s teams is astronomical,” explains CEO Kathryn Gill, “yet the Matildas are one of the biggest sporting teams in Australia. We approached Jen because nothing is too challenging for her – she is relentless and gets a lot of pleasure in tackling injustices.” Robinson says she hopes the case goes ahead: “Inequality in prize money is unacceptable and violates FIFA’s human rights obligations under its own constitution.”

Hardworking, loyal, relentless: the epithets turn up again and again, but the same people assure me Robinson knows how to party and has a wide circle of friends. “She is great fun,” says Helena Kennedy, “and interested in all the arts. We went to the Venice Biennale together – it’s all part of who she is.”

Robinson used to play touch footy with a men’s team but says it’s too difficult to fit in group sports with all her travelling. “Now I bushwalk and do yoga and surf whenever I can.” Keina Yoshida recalls Robinson taking a party of friends to Montpellier in southern France to watch the Matildas beat Brazil in the 2019 World Cup: “She bought us all team T-shirts.”

Robinson once told an interviewer that she keeps only champagne in her fridge. As for those beautifully cut dresses she’s wearing in multiple press photographs? They’re sourced for her by a stylist. “I hate shopping,” she says. “I’d rather be out with my friends.”

I’ve been in touch with her on and off for weeks for this story. She’s always on message, always replies promptly, but is like the Scarlet Pimpernel – I’m never quite sure where she’ll be. One minute at the cinema with her friend Jemima Khan for a private screening of Khan’s new film, the next on a plane to Geneva for another filing at the UN. By the time you read this, she’ll be in Australia. I can’t help but wonder how frequent international travel fits with her climate concerns. “I do try to limit it but there are bigger structural problems than my flights,” she says crisply.

There’s steel beneath that bonny exterior.

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