Christian Porter and Kate: a tale of two stories
The ABC’s Four Corners program didn’t reveal a key source for its story on alleged historical rape claims involving Christian Porter.
Last year on March 8, the ABC Four Corners program told viewers it was presenting “the story behind the allegation” that Christian Porter had allegedly raped 16-year-old Kate 33 years earlier.
Two days later, Louise Milligan, the journalist who presented that Four Corners program, tweeted: “I never met Kate but … I feel confident that she would have been moved and gratified to see that #BelieveKate is trending number one in Australia. #auspol”.
Only now that Porter has lodged a complaint with the ABC that explains the true background do we know there were two stories. Only now do we know #BelieveKate was not as simple as that.
The “before” story was written by Kate alone in an 88-page statement. She started drafting this in September 2019 and completed it in mid-December 2019. Critically, this was the only statement Kate wrote by herself. “No one has helped me prepare this draft,” she writes on page three of her 88-page statement. It is also the only statement Kate signed.
The “after” story was prepared by Kate and her lawyers. It took the form of a shorter 25-page document and was created by editing her own 88-page statement. That 25-page edited version of Kate’s story became public last year when her friends sent it anonymously to Scott Morrison and other politicians in February 2021. That 25-page version was never signed by Kate.
Incredibly, Four Corners withheld from viewers the existence of the secret original document – Kate’s 88-page statement – even though the program used parts of it for its story.
Comparing the two documents reveals the full extent of the way the public broadcaster suppressed information from Kate’s own version of her story, either recklessly or deliberately, when presenting the explosive allegation of rape against Porter.
Only now do we know that Kate’s secret 88-page statement that Four Corners withheld from viewers differed markedly from her later 25-page document.
Four Corners tells a story that Milligan, the program’s executive producer Sally Neighbour and those of Kate’s friends who sent the 25-page “after” document to politicians, wanted told. “Bursting the Canberra Bubble” is their story.
Kate’s full story, told by her in her original statement suppressed from viewers by Four Corners, includes claims by Kate that she suffered from bruising and anal bleeding in late 2019 as she was writing her 88-page document. She says these were caused by recovered memories of the rape that she says occurred 33 years earlier.
There are myriad other incredible claims and substantial inconsistencies between Kate’s unedited version and the “later” story told with the help of her lawyers in the 25-page document. Critical material in Kate’s original statement that she claims to be contemporaneous notes about the rape was altered when it appears in the 25-page statement.
None of this is presented to shame the victim. Kate suffered from severe mental health issues before she took her own life in 2020. She was dreadfully, tragically unwell. Shame rests solely with the ABC’s Four Corners program for producing and airing a story that suppressed the complexities, inconsistencies and implausible claims behind Kate’s rape allegation.
Incredibly, the Four Corners program carefully extracted a handful of key quotes from that 88-page statement without revealing the existence of the source document. Instead, Four Corners alluded only to another document – the “after” one, the 25-page unsigned statement that was pulled together with the help of lawyers.
Kate’s 88-page statement has not been made public. That is understandable. It was written by Kate to take to her lawyers. But once Four Corners relied on parts of Kate’s original document, the program should at the very least have mentioned it was the source. The program should have made at least some reference to the many discrepancies, inconsistencies and edits between the two statements.
Having used the 88-page statement to air rape allegations against Porter, the program should have given him a copy. Porter received a copy of Kate’s original statement that he could use for the purposes of his complaint only recently.
We know Four Corners had both documents because the Four Corners program used five extracts, overlaid with an actor’s voice, from the 88-page statement. These extracts do not appear in the 25-page document or they are differently worded. Yet Four Corners chose not to tell viewers those extracts came from Kate’s original statement.
The ABC also submitted the original 88-page document in its defence of the defamation action launched by Porter against the ABC over the program.
Instead of being honest with viewers about the existence of two statements, Four Corners only alludes to the unsigned later one. The program used one single extract from this document.
As Porter makes clear in his 49-page complaint handed to the ABC on Friday, the Four Corners program failed to meet recognised standards of objective journalism on the following fronts. First, Four Corners failed to mention Kate’s 88-page statement. Second, the program presented a small portion of that document when it suited the version of a story Four Corners wanted to tell. Third, the program suppressed large parts of Kate’s original statement that significantly undermined the credibility of Kate’s allegation of rape. Fourth, the program ignored important inconsistencies between the two documents.
In sum, the Four Corners program failed to include material that viewers needed to fairly assess the serious allegation of rape against Porter in the program.
It would have been easy for Four Corners to present a balanced and fair program to viewers in March last year. The program could simply have said that there was an 88-page statement signed by Kate that contained material that raised questions about the credibility of Kate’s claims of rape; that raised questions about the veracity of Kate’s claims about her near contemporaneous diary notes; that raised alarm bells because that 88-page statement was, in important respects, inconsistent with the 25-page statement that her lawyers worked on.
Instead, the Four Corners program said nothing about any of these matters.
Did Milligan or Neighbour ever wonder why material from the 88-page statement did not appear in the 25-page statement? Did it cross their mind that content from Kate’s 88-page statement was excluded from the later 25-page document because substantial parts of the former were implausible, in some cases demonstrably wrong, inconsistent with the later document, and that significant parts of Kate’s unedited statement undermined the credibility of her allegation of rape?
What did ABC lawyers make of the discrepancies, inconsistencies and bizarre claims in Kate’s 88-page statement? Did they even see it when they legalled the show?
Porter deserves answers. And so do taxpayers who fund these journalists and this program.
While motive doesn’t matter for the purposes of determining editorial breaches, we are also entitled to ask: Was this just sloppy journalism? Or campaign journalism?
You be the judge.
OMISSIONS AND DISCREPANCIES
Here is a summary of some of the alarm bells raised in Christian Porter’s complaint to the ABC lodged on Friday.
1.Claims of stigmata injuries and bleeding withheld from ABC Four Corners viewers
In her own 88-page statement, Kate says bruises appeared on the sole of her right foot in September 2018. She says these arose “from Porter kicking me, to spread my legs” when he allegedly raped her 33 years earlier.
In this 88-page statement, Kate wrote: “Please see The Body Keeps Score (Van der Kolk, 2015) for an explanation of how the body will store traumatic events and only allow them to resurface when your mind is able to examine them, often decades later.”
Kate mentions other bruises, including anal bleeding, that appeared in November and December 2019, the same time she says she completed her 88-page statement, that she attributed to the alleged rape 33 years before.
All of this material forms part of the “before” story told by Kate in her 88-page statement. All of it was edited out of the “after” statement pulled together in late 2019 with her lawyers to form the 25-page document that was later sent to Scott Morrison and other MPs in February last year to make the complaint.
Why did Four Corners withhold from viewers Kate’s lengthy claims that she suffered bruising, injuries and bleeding in late 2019 that she explained as being caused by a rape 33 years earlier? Was it because it undermined her rape allegation?
Porter, a lawyer, points to the leading NSW case on the unreliable nature of recovered memories, where one doctor told the court: “A wide variety of learned bodies, the Australian New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, the American and the British and the Canadian equivalent, all are of the view that what is known as recovered memory is forensically unreliable. So it really cannot be relied on as an account of matters of fact …”
2 Other omissions
Nor did Four Corners tell viewers that Kate said, in her later 25-page document, that she had a better understanding of her memories of rape after reading a controversial book about repressed memories, The Body Keeps Score, in September 2019. The program also withheld from viewers Kate’s description in that later document about the “surreal quality” of her memories of being raped, or her admission about “the dissociative states that I have”.
3 No evidence of near
contemporaneous notes about the rape
Four Corners had both Kate’s 88-page statement and the later 25-page document when it produced the program. Yet it ignored a glaring obvious inconsistency.
In Kate’s 88-page “before” statement, she includes four photos of four ripped pages of paper. Kate says these ripped pages come from her Food Journal. She says the pages describe “Porter rapes in January 1988”.
The pages in the photos in the 88-page document are all white, and blank; nothing is discernible from them.
In the 25-page “after” document prepared with lawyers there are different photos of the same ripped pages of these Food Journal pages. Only now the ripped pages have blue texta added to them.
The “after” version of these pages feature one word in blue texta per page added in January 2020 to read DONT- WANT-TO-XTIAN-PLEASE-DO-NOT TAKE-ME-!!! One photo in the 25-page document shows a Post-it note that says: “texta annotations made Jan’ 2020 by K.”
An objective journalist would have asked whether the original “before” photos of ripped pages were evidence of anything at all, let alone an alleged rape. And why, moreover at whose behest if any, were these pages altered in January 2020 and included in the unsigned 25-page document?
4 More material Four
Corners ignored
In her 88-page “before” statement, Kate includes a “transcript” she typed in November 2019.
She says those typed words are a translation of what she calls her “Princeton Diary”. She says the Princeton Diary was written sometime in 1989.
The November 2019 “transcript” of the Princeton Diary includes these words – “took what he wanted. Me. My virginity & my voice”. She says she transcribed the words after running a blue texta over the pages and using a magnifying glass to reveal the words scratched into them with a compass.
In Kate’s later 25-page statement, the one she worked on with lawyers, there are four photos she said she took in February 2020 of four pages from her Princeton Diary that she said bore the words she transcribed in later 2019.
The four photos show four pages covered in thick blue highlighter. Kate says these photographed pages “detail my having been raped three times by Christian Porter”.
Yet no words are discernible from these photographs. In other words, there is no physical evidence of those words alleging the rape on the pages.
5 Another inconsistency
In her 88-page statement, Kate says that Porter pursued her for years after the rape. The 25-page document makes of no mention of that pursuit. Why not? Was it because there is no evidence of Porter pursuing Kate?
6 Another discrepancy
In her 88-page statement, Kate says definitively that Porter washed her hair and shaved her legs mid-rape in a bath at Women’s College. Her later 25-page statement says it was a “bath or a shower”. Why the change? Was it because it was hard to believe that Kate sat in a bath, mid-rape, in a communal bathroom as her alleged rapist washed and conditioned her hair and shaved her legs and her armpits?
7Another alarm bell
In her 88-page “before” statement, Kate says she went to dinner with Porter and another man on the Monday after Porter raped her. She includes a photo of her diary entry about the dinner that shows she kept the bus ticket. None of this is included in the 25-page document.
Why not? Perhaps because dining with Porter two nights after the alleged rape could raise questions about the credibility of her rape allegation?
8 More alarm bells
In her 88-page statement, Kate includes what she says is a “transcript of ‘f..k it’ note to self re telling James Hooke”. Kate says she wrote the F..k It note in January 1991.
When writing her 88-page statement in late 2019, she described the F..k It note to readers like this: “I was trying to psych myself up to tell my former boyfriend, James, what Porter had done to me.”
In fact, there is nothing whatsoever in the F..k It note that mentions Porter raping her.
9Yet another alarm bell
In her 88-page “before” statement, Kate includes photos of pages from what she calls her “Don’t Be Apart” journals.
She says this is an example of how she “conflated” two men, Porter and former boyfriend James Hooke.
The Don’t be Apart Journal is said to contain “significant elements about Porter’s raping me” as well as information about her inability to maintain a healthy relationship with her former boyfriend.
This material does not in fact mention rape in any way at all. And this material was not included in the edited 25-page document. Why not? Did Kate’s admission of conflating memories or Kate’s belief a diary contained significant elements about a rape when it clearly does not, undermine the allegation of rape?
Porter lists many other issues in his complaint that amounted to breaches of the ABC’s editorial policies and guidelines.
He says: “These inexplicable omissions of obviously relevant material constitute a clear failure to supply the audience with the information they needed to assess the story fairly.”
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