Podcast sparks new shadow of doubt
A legal petition argues that parents jailed for child abuse are victims of a miscarriage of justice triggered by their daughter’s false memories.
They were denounced as the most evil parents in Australia – an outwardly respectable couple who kept their daughter as a sexual slave, subjecting her to more than a decade of unspeakable abuse and torture on their rural property in NSW. Their trial ended in record jail terms, but in 2023 this newspaper released a podcast, Shadow of Doubt, which raised fundamental questions about the reliability of their daughter’s allegations and the evidence that was used to convict them.
Two years later, the podcast has sparked a renewed legal push for the couple to be exonerated and released from prison. A legal petition lodged with the NSW Governor last month argues that not only were the guilty verdicts a miscarriage of justice but that none of the horrendous crimes the couple’s daughter described in court might even have occurred.
The petition was lodged by lawyers representing the mother and cites reams of new evidence, much of it first revealed by Shadow of Doubt, which contradicts the bizarre and extreme allegations the daughter made in court. Backed by prominent experts in neuroscience, pharmacology and gynaecology, the petition argues that her allegations are likely the result of false memories triggered by ill-advised counselling and excessive doses of psychotropic drugs.
The jailed mother – now in her 60s and in her 10th year in prison – tells The Australian she feels the legal system is finally taking seriously her claims of innocence, which she has vehemently maintained since her daughter first accused her in 2011.
“For the first time in 14 years, a legal team has listened to me as a mother, about what I believe happened to my daughter after she received treatment and therapy in the mental health system, and the devastating consequences of that to her and our entire family,” she says.
The family at the centre of the case cannot be identified because of a court suppression order, and The Australian has chosen to call the parents Susan and Martin Johnson. Although they separated before their trial in 2016, the Johnsons both proclaim their innocence, and Martin Johnson’s legal team is believed to be preparing a separate petition for the quashing of his conviction.
The Johnsons were both accomplished athletes who for many years trained their four children and dozens of young athletes in the regional area of NSW where they lived.
In 2010 their teenage daughter “Emily”, an accomplished athlete who had broken records in her sport, accused a male coach of sexual assault and was admitted to a mental health hospital suffering severe depression. After several months of counselling, she began making sexual assault allegations against her father, and eventually also accused her mother of participating in the abuse. At her parents’ trial in 2016, she testified she had suffered constant and severe sexual abuse from the ages of five to 18, including being repeatedly locked in a shed on the family property where she was violated with rusty tools, wrapped in barbed wire, starved of food and forced to eat hot chillies.
None of Emily’s family, friends, fellow athletes or boyfriends saw any evidence of the extreme violence she alleged, and two of her siblings – “Rebecca” and “Daniel” – insist her allegations are impossible to believe. But another sister, “Sarah”, testified in court that their father had sexually assaulted her when he performed sports massages.
After a three-month trial, Martin Johnson was convicted on 73 charges and jailed for 48 years, the longest sentence for child abuse in Australian history. Susan Johnson was sentenced to 16 years. Their appeals to the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal and the High Court were rejected.
In 2023, The Australian’s eight-part podcast, Shadow of Doubt, raised serious questions about the case, revealing that the Johnsons’ lawyers had failed to call crucial witnesses during the trial. Those witnesses included a forensic psychiatrist, who cautioned that their daughter might have suffered false memories, and a senior sexual assault doctor who had examined Emily for police and disputed the prosecution’s claim that there was evidence of vaginal trauma.
Among the podcast’s other revelations:
● A psychiatrist and several nurses from the psychiatric hospital where Emily was treated revealed their doubts about her reliability and their concerns about her treatment.
● The magistrate who committed Martin Johnson for trial acknowledged he had visited Emily in the psychiatric hospital and allowed her to stay at his house.
● The police officer who first interviewed Emily became her de facto partner.
It can now be revealed that the podcast sparked a series of events that led to the current legal campaign to overturn the case. After listening to Shadow of Doubt, a group of concerned psychiatrists and medical professionals contacted The Australian and began circulating a petition calling for the case to be reviewed.
Among the signatories was Richard Bryant, director of the University of NSW Traumatic Stress Clinic, and Richard White, former director of psychiatry at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital.
One of the psychiatrists who helped initiate the petition, Hans Knutzelius, says The Australian’s reporting strongly suggests that Emily Johnson developed false memories of childhood abuse while undergoing intensive counselling, a well-recognised issue in psychiatry.
“There is really no scientific evidence that people can repress memories of abuse in childhood and recover those memories years later,” Knutzelius says. “Unfortunately, if you are depressed and anxious you can be extremely vulnerable and suggestible to the idea, particularly if you fall into the hands of a counsellor who believes it to be true.”
In March last year the petition came to the attention of Ragni Mathur SC, a Sydney barrister with extensive experience in criminal and medico-legal cases. Mathur listened to the Shadow of Doubt podcast and formed a legal team, instructed by solicitor Hayley Le. They contacted The Australian, which agreed to provide information about witnesses who had spoken in the podcast and other evidence it had uncovered.
Mathur confirmed to The Australian that she agreed to represent Susan Johnson after listening to the podcast and reviewing documents from the case. Several additional barristers have since joined her team to complete the petition for a pardon, which was submitted to the NSW Governor, former Federal Court judge Margaret Beazley, last month.
Support also was provided by the Not Guilty project at the University of Sydney that is co-led by Celine Van Golde, an expert in memory and forensic psychology.
Sources close to the Johnson family have told The Australian that the petition legal team obtained reports from four pre-eminent experts – a professor of neuropsychiatry, a neuropsychologist, an expert in neuroscience and memory, and a senior gynaecologist – which raise fundamental questions about Emily’s mental health treatment, the plausibility of her account and the expert evidence presented at the trial.
Mathur confirmed that the petition contains extensive expert evidence but declined to comment on its contents. She noted that the NSW Crimes Act authorised the Governor to issue a pardon or direct that a case be reviewed if there appeared to be “doubt or question” as to guilt.
“We have submitted a petition which argues that a miscarriage of justice has occurred in our client’s case and that she be pardoned or, failing that, a judicial inquiry reviews the evidence,” she said.
In 2022 a judicial inquiry in NSW exonerated convicted murderer Kathleen Folbigg, citing scientific evidence that her four children could have died of natural causes. Folbigg had spent 20 years in prison and is now seeking compensation.
The Australian understands Susan Johnson’s petition includes affidavits from many of the witnesses who first spoke on the Shadow of Doubt podcast, and argues that the trial defence lawyers failed to present crucial evidence to the jury. The Johnsons’ daughter Rebecca confirmed to The Australian that she and her brother had provided affidavits containing material that directly contradicted their sister’s account of her childhood.
“I’m incredibly grateful for the hard work Mum’s legal team have done and the time they have committed,” she said. “Finally, someone listened and worked properly on this. Everyone in my entire family, including my sister, has suffered from this case.”
Since the podcast went to air, The Australian has continued to investigate the case, including one key piece of evidence – a diary that Emily Johnson said she wrote as a 14-year-old and that she handed to police more than a year after first accusing her father. The diary contains dozens of handwritten entries detailing his alleged acts of abuse and torture.
The diary was crucial to the prosecution case because one of its entries recorded Emily burying the tools her father allegedly torture her with. She later led police to several locations on the family property where they located buried tools.
During the trial, Emily acknowledged that some of the diary entries erroneously recorded her being tortured and locked in the shed on days when her father was actually overseas. She explained that she sometimes wrote diary entries days after they occurred and might have got dates wrong.
But The Australian has analysed the diary and detected more than 120 errors or anomalies when comparing it with contemporaneous records such as date-stamped photographs, Emily’s sports results, newspaper articles and diaries kept by other members of the Johnson family.
In several entries, Emily records herself being tortured or imprisoned in the shed at home on dates when photographs show her sightseeing with her family interstate, smiling at the winners’ podium or competing hundreds of kilometres from home.
In one instance, the diary records her attending an interstate sporting event on two separate dates, months apart, but both dates are wrong. The pages that should record the event are missing from the diary.
The diary fails to mention many significant events during the year, such as Emily’s appearance on television and the 15 weekend athletics camps at the family property that were attended by her friends. It does not mention that a young athlete from her father’s squad was living with the family for more than six months during the year and was homeschooled by her mother.
The authenticity of the diary is believed to be a central issue in the petition that was sent to the Governor last month, along with questions about how Emily Johnson could have been viciously tortured throughout her childhood and adolescence without anyone noticing and while pursuing a high-level athletics career that involved constant training sessions and competitions attended by her close friends.
In NSW, the Governor can direct that a judicial inquiry be conducted or a pardon be granted on the advice of the state Attorney-General, who can refer the case to the Court of Criminal Appeal for an opinion or an appeal hearing. That process can be lengthy – the NSW government took three years to appoint the first inquiry into Folbigg’s case, which failed to exonerate her. It was only after sustained pressure that the second inquiry was approved.
Susan Johnson is eligible for parole in June 2027, and acknowledges that if she had accepted a plea deal in exchange for testifying against her husband she would have been free years ago. She refused to do that and continues to assert his innocence, as well her own.
“One of the other women in here asked me recently whether I regretted not taking a plea,” she says. “I told her: ‘No, absolutely not.’ I’ll die in here before I ever give up on the truth.”
* The images used in this article are for illustrative purposes only and bear no resemblance to the real people in this story, who cannot be identified for legal reasons.
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