Christian Porter rape allegations: Unreconcilable teenage memories
The woman who accused Christian Porter of raping her in 1988 spent the next day with him and believed they had a long-term future despite the alleged attack.
The woman who accused Christian Porter of raping her at a debating tournament in 1988 went on to spend the next day with him, according to her detailed retelling of the incident, believing they had a long-term future together despite the savagery of the alleged attack.
Her detailed account of what she described as an eight-year involvement with the future federal Attorney-General, documented in a 25-page unsigned statement she planned to give to the police, is deeply at odds with his declaration that he knew her “for only the briefest periods” when they were teenagers and had no contact he could recall after the night of the alleged rape.
The scandal now reaches beyond Mr Porter’s capacity to stay on as Australia’s first law officer and the implications for a government still reeling from the Brittany Higgins affair, entangling luminaries of business, finance and the law — the cream of a generation who figured in the elite schools and university debating scene three decades ago and went on to excel in their chosen fields.
High-flyers such as Macquarie Group senior managing director James Hooke, international clean-energy guru Danny Kennedy, prominent Canberra barrister Chris Erskine SC and federal Labor MP Daniel Mulino could be called before an inquest if the South Australian Coroner decides to act, an outcome Scott Morrison said on Friday he would welcome.
They could also feature in any judicial-style inquiry into the rape allegation in the event the Prime Minister buckled to demands for such an investigation.
In the years immediately after the alleged attack, the woman struggled with how to deal with her memories of the alleged incident. In January 1991, she wrote a circular note where she debated whether to unburden herself to Mr Hooke, with whom she had had a relationship.
“How can I tell this tale?” she pondered in her diary in January 1991. “Who to? James — maybe … if we ever get back together.”
The competing accounts of the woman and Mr Porter cannot be reconciled and now are unlikely to be easily resolved given her death. The Attorney-General insists they did not have sex on the night in question or at any other time, and at an emotional press conference on Wednesday said the only involvement he could recall with her was at debating events.
But the woman said, following the alleged rape on January 10, 1988, she spent the day with a then 17-year-old Mr Porter after he allegedly forced her to perform oral sex and anally raped her while they were representing Australia at an international debating tournament in Sydney. Mr Porter adamantly denies this.
At a dinner with him in Perth in September 1994, the woman said Mr Porter propositioned her and joked “you owe me one”, which she took to be a reference to the alleged attack.
This “broke the spell that had been cast seven years earlier” when, on the day of alleged rape, Mr Porter had boasted he would be prime minister one day and need a “smart, pretty wife” to help his career.
“I was flattered by his compliments and implicit suggestion that he would need a smart and pretty wife,” the woman said in her statement, drafted in the months before her death last year and reviewed by Melbourne entrepreneur Jeremy Samuel, whom she knew from school debating.
This was sent last week anonymously by her friends to Mr Morrison, Labor frontbencher Penny Wong and Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young along with a covering letter that acknowledged concern by her parents that mental illness could have caused to have “confected or embellished” the allegation against Mr Porter. The dossier was referred to the NSW Police Force, which announced this week it had insufficient grounds to investigate and closed the case.
Prominent media identities are also captured in the web of contacts that dates back to the woman’s student days at one of Adelaide’s most exclusive private schools. News.com.au national political editor Samantha Maiden, who broke the story of Ms Higgins’ alleged rape two years ago on a couch in the office of embattled Defence Minister Linda Reynolds, was a classmate, while the ABC’s Louise Milligan, the first to report the rape allegation against Mr Porter, is close to Nick Ryan, The Australian’s wine writer who was another good friend.
Fear of pregnancy
The statement records that on the morning after the alleged rape, the woman had reassured herself “it was OK” because she and Mr Porter were to be married, a belief she held until their dinner encounter six years later.
En route to lunch with Mr Kennedy, another friend from debating and now managing director of the California Clean Energy Fund, she said Mr Porter returned from a visit to the toilets at Sydney’s Central Station talking about “how different last night could have been” had there been a condom vending machine at the University of Sydney dormitory where she was staying.
The woman said Mr Porter had raped her anally because he professed not to want to get her pregnant. “He had claimed that he did not have a condom that night because his then girlfriend was a “good Catholic girl” and sex was “out of the question” or he would have had one in his wallet, the woman said in her statement.
Mr Samuel, a member of the 1988-89 national debating team the woman captained after the alleged rape, said she had told him of her story after they reconnected in June 2019. He then helped edit the statement outlining her relationship with Perth-based Mr Porter and the alleged sex attack, running in its original form to 88 pages. This was prepared for her to take to NSW police.
She was open about the mental illness she had contracted and the “dissociative” impact on her memory, Mr Samuel said. Having asked to see him alone at their first meeting, explaining she had something “very personal” to impart, she sent a note and flowers to his wife to apologise for the imposition.
“To me, that was not the actions of an obsessive, crazy person,” he told The Weekend Australian. “That to me is someone who is caring, considerate and a bit self-aware.”
Out and about
In reply to questions from The Weekend Australian setting out the woman’s claims of extensive interaction with him before and after the alleged rape, his office maintained that “to the best of his recollection” Mr Porter had had no contact with the woman since January 1988.
“If there is some information that there was some form of contact in the early 1990s, that is not impossible and it’s not a case of disputing that possibility,” his spokesman said. “But the Attorney-General does not recollect any specific contact since 1988 in that period over three decades ago.
“And, as noted by the Attorney-General on Wednesday, he has never seen the anonymous letter sent to Members of Parliament and then to police and has absolutely no idea what claims are made in it other than was has been reported in the media.”
The woman said she first encountered Mr Porter as a 15-year-old at the Australian School Students Debating competition in her hometown of Adelaide in July 1986. They danced at the final night party of the following year’s tournament.
In September 1987, while she was in Perth for the national final of a speaking competition, Mr Porter took her on afternoon outing to Kings Park, causing her to nearly miss her flight home. Back in the WA capital for the JayCees’ national finals later that year, she was “fairly sure” he introduced her to his mother before they attended a school fete together.
In the lead-up to the January 1988 World Universities Debating Championship at the University of Sydney, the four-member national debating team captained by Mr Porter assembled in Canberra where the coach, Mr Erskine, took them windsurfing on Lake Burley Griffin.
According to the woman, Mr Porter told her she should be wearing a bikini, but it was a “shame you don’t have the tits for it”. Shocked, she said nothing. On New Year’s Eve she and her teammates — Mr Porter, Matthew Deeble and Mr Mulino — attended a party in Canberra.
The world titles started in Sydney on Monday, January 4. The woman was billeted in a room at Women’s College, while the boys and Mr Erskine stayed at St Paul’s next door. The tournament ended with a formal dinner on Saturday, January 9.
Ahead of this Mr Porter asked the woman if she would iron his blue and white-striped dress shirt, which she did in the communal laundry, according to her statement. Sitting on a chair, watching while she ironed the shirt, Mr Porter purportedly said she would “make a wonderful wife” one day.
Confronting details
This week, the Attorney-General said he remembered only two evening events from that week — one at a college with “bowls of prawns” and it “sounds about right” that the team went out dancing after the formal dinner.
The woman said they ended up at the Hard Rock Cafe, an impossibility given the venue did not open until 1989. More likely it was the Oz Rock Cafe, a popular nightspot in Kings Cross. They were drinking heavily, and the woman was drunk. Mr Porter said it was possible he walked her back to her room, though he had no recollection of this. “Was there a sexual involvement with anybody on that trip?” he was asked. “No,” he said.
The woman’s description of the alleged rape is confronting. She alleged Mr Porter propositioned her, asking: “How about a pearl necklace?”, a sex act to which she agreed. He then forced her to perform oral sex against her will, she claimed. She lost track of time, “dissociating badly in order to cope”.
When she vomited, he said: “Come on … I’ll clean you up.” She was still too drunk to stand, so he helped her wash in the bathroom. She remembered seeing him write on a steam-misted mirror, “Christian Porter was ‘ere, Jan 88”, before he shaved her legs and underarms, then conditioned her hair. He dressed her in a nightgown and helped her into bed, her statement said.
She woke to him anally raping her, she alleged.
Princeton Diary
The woman said she told no one what had happened partly because she was ashamed, but also because of her schoolgirl dream of a life with Mr Porter as his wife. Within months, she had succeeded him as captain of Australian School Students Debating team with a new line-up: Mr Samuel had been wheeled in alongside Mr Hooke. On a tour to North America in early 1989, she began jotting notes in a journal, her “Princeton Diary”, about the trauma she had endured. Photographs of these entries in a jagged hand are contained in her statement. “The nightmare is back,” she recorded at one point.
Mr Samuel, 51, said he had no inkling at the time of his friend’s torment. They stayed in touch after they drifted off to university and into their careers – she as a historian, he as an entrepreneur, ultimately to establish the successful digital metals exchange he runs today in Melbourne.
Mental illness
While her peers prospered, she never rose to the heights that those who knew her at high school had expected. She suffered mental illness and attempted suicide on a number of occasions, prompting her parents to worry that she would be found to be an unreliable witness if Mr Porter were ever brought to trial.
Her statement describes how she gained a better understanding of her fragmented memories of the alleged rape when she was referred by her psychologist to the research of Bessel van der Kolk, a devotee of discredited recovered memory therapy.
Mr Samuel said he had no doubt “something had happened” to cause the woman to contract what seemed to him to be a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. “I had no way of knowing what did or did not happen because I was not there,” he said.
“But she was congruent, consistent and clear about what she was saying and absolutely believed to be true, 100 per cent.”
Mr Porter on Wednesday, however, appealed for the benefit of the doubt, citing his experience as a prosecutor before he entered politics. “There are circumstances where someone might absolutely believe something, but it might not be a reliable account,” he said.
“That is actually why we have a justice system. It is why we have courts and the presumption of innocence and burdens of proffer. That is why we do these things in that process and not like this.”
