Roberts-Smith pressured me to lie about his affair, estranged wife tells court

The estranged wife of war veteran Ben Roberts-Smith has told the Federal Court she discovered her husband was having an affair when his girlfriend turned up at the couple’s Sunshine Coast home with a black eye and told her she had been pregnant with his child.

Emma Roberts, who appeared in the witness box in Mr Roberts-Smith’s defamation case for the first time on Monday, said her husband subsequently pressured her to lie to the press in 2018 and say the pair were separated at the time of his affair. She told the court they did not separate until January 2020.

Emma Roberts, the estranged wife of Ben Roberts-Smith, arrives at the Federal Court in Sydney on Monday.Credit: Brook Mitchell

Ms Roberts, who married the former special forces soldier in December 2003, said her husband gestured to the couple’s children in 2018 and said, “If you don’t lie, you will lose them.”

“I knew at that point I had to lie for him,” Ms Roberts said.

Mr Roberts-Smith convinced her to appear with him in a photo for a front-page story in The Australian in August 2018, she said, after details of his relationship appeared in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.

That month, Mr Roberts-Smith launched defamation proceedings against The Age and the Herald, owned by Nine, and The Canberra Times, now under separate ownership, over a series of articles in 2018 that he says accuse him of being a war criminal and of punching his former girlfriend in the face.

He denies all wrongdoing. The media outlets are seeking to rely on a defence of truth.

The former Special Air Service soldier told the Federal Court last year that his former girlfriend, dubbed Person 17 to protect her identity, was “extremely intoxicated” after a dinner at Parliament House in Canberra in March 2018 and had fallen down a flight of stairs. He said he tended to the bump on her head at their hotel.

Ms Roberts said Person 17 appeared out of the blue at the couple’s home on April 6, 2018, and used the mobile phone of the couple’s housekeeper to call Ms Roberts, who was at the supermarket.

Person 17 described herself as “friend of your husband’s”, Ms Roberts said, and “she asked me to come back to the house”.

Ms Roberts drove home immediately and was confronted with a “crying” Person 17 sitting in the garden with Ms Roberts’ parents, she said.

“I asked her when they had last seen each other, and she said the night prior,” she said.

Ms Roberts said Person 17 showed her text messages between her and Mr Roberts-Smith, and she spent the next three hours reading details of their relationship.

She told the court that Person 17 told her she had fallen pregnant during the relationship and it was “definitely Ben’s” child, but “she no longer had the pregnancy at that time”.

Ms Roberts said Person 17 was “wearing a pink and black dress [and] black shoes” and a “big pair of black sunglasses”. She asked Person 17 to remove the sunglasses and saw that she had a black eye, Ms Roberts said.

She said Person 17 told her that she had fallen down a set of stairs while drunk at Parliament House.

Ms Roberts said she asked Person 17 why she was not going to be seeing Mr Roberts-Smith any more “and she kept pointing to her black eye, saying ‘because of this’.”

She said Person 17 didn’t answer when Ms Roberts’ mother asked: “Are you saying that Ben did that to you?”

Under cross-examination by Mr Roberts-Smith’s barrister, Bruce McClintock, SC, Ms Roberts agreed Person 17 said during that conversation that “she had embarrassed” the former soldier.

Mr McClintock put it to Ms Roberts repeatedly that the pair were separated from late 2017, a suggestion she rejected.

Ben Roberts-Smith arrives at the Federal Court in Sydney on Monday.Credit: Brook Mitchell

Ms Roberts was shown a message she sent to her best friend in January 2018 while she was on holiday with her husband and their children in Singapore, in which she said: “How is he ever going to tell Kerry we are separated?”

She agreed this was a reference to Mr Roberts-Smith’s boss, Seven West Media chairman Kerry Stokes. Mr Roberts-Smith has taken leave from his role as general manager of Seven Queensland during the defamation trial. Asked what she was referring to in that message, Ms Roberts said: “I don’t recall.”

She denied she had come to “loathe and detest” Mr Roberts-Smith since their marriage broke down, but agreed she had been “very angry”.

Ms Roberts was initially expected to be a witness for her husband and to say the couple were separated when he started a relationship with Person 17. She told the court the information she had previously given Mr Roberts-Smith’s lawyers was wrong, and she was being pressured by him to lie.

Mr Roberts-Smith told the court last year that domestic violence was “morally reprehensible” and his parents had instilled in him a “very good set of values”. He had no tolerance for anybody who would raise a hand to a woman, he said.

The former SAS soldier has given evidence that he separated from Ms Roberts in late September 2017 and they remained separated for about six months. Ms Roberts said on Monday that this was not the case.

Mr Roberts-Smith told the court that Person 17 told him in February 2018 that she was pregnant and they agreed to terminate the pregnancy. But he said he suspected the pregnancy was not real and he was being “manipulated so that I would stay in the relationship”. The relationship ended in April that year, the court has heard.

A joint investigation by The Age, the Herald and 60 Minutes, aired last year, alleged Mr Roberts-Smith dug a hole in the backyard of his family home and buried USB drives inside a lunchbox to hide them from both police and military investigations.

Ms Roberts told the court on Monday that she suspected Mr Roberts-Smith may have been burying cash in the backyard.

She and her best friend had subsequently dug up a lunchbox in the couple’s backyard, she said, and found it contained “USBs double-bagged in snap-lock bags”. She said her friend downloaded the contents of the USBs onto her laptop before they “re-buried” the lunchbox and its contents.

Ms Roberts denied that her evidence about the discovery of the lunchbox was a fabrication.

Mr Roberts-Smith launched separate Federal Court action against Ms Roberts on the eve of his defamation trial, seeking to find out if she gave confidential information to the newspapers’ lawyers.

In response to that action, Ms Roberts was ordered to provide certain documents to the court and explain how she obtained them, while the newspapers and their lawyers in the defamation proceedings were subpoenaed for any documents Ms Roberts had given them. Ms Roberts complied with the orders, and no documents arose from the subpoenas.

Mr Roberts-Smith’s lawyers subsequently made an application to have Ms Roberts cross-examined. Justice Robert Bromwich rejected that application. He said many of the assertions made against Ms Roberts had been “shown to be ill-founded”.

Mr Roberts-Smith has now filed an application for leave to appeal against that ruling.

The trial before Justice Anthony Besanko continues.

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