Surreal quality to rape accuser’s body memories

The woman who accused ­Christian Porter of rape suggested they may have resurfaced while she was undergoing psychotherapy.

The woman who accused Attorney-General Christian Porter of rapesuggested they may have resurfaced after many years while she was undergoing psychotherapy.

The woman who accused ­Attorney-General Christian Porter of rape described her recollections as “body memories” and suggested they may have resurfaced after many years while she was undergoing psychotherapy.

In a statement she wrote in June last year, the woman ­acknowledged that her memories of the alleged rape in January 1988 had a “surreal” quality, and described herself as being prone to dissociative mental states.

According to the documents, the woman suffered at various times from an eating disorder and bipolar disorder. She had consulted multiple counsellors, including the Sydney psychologist Katie Thorncraft.

Ms Thorncraft is listed as a staff psychologist at Purify Essential Wellness, a northern Sydney centre owned by Anne-Maree Zofrea, a “Clairvoyant and Certified Angel Intuitive”.

Ms Thorncraft is a practitioner of Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing, a quasi-hypnotic counselling technique which has been subject to evidentiary restrictions in Australian courts because of its potential to affect memory.

The woman’s statement says that in September 2019 Ms Thorncraft suggested she read the book The Body Keeps The Score, by US psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, which argues that traumatic experiences can cause the brain to “dissociate” and shut down conscious memory, leaving behind “body memories” which can surface many years later. This theory is controversial because it harks back to the ­recovered-memory phenomenon of the 1980s and 90s, which caused an epidemic of false and unreliable recollections of sexual abuse.

After reading the book, the woman says she realised that “our bodies will store traumatic events and only allow them to resurface when our minds are able to examine them, usually several decades later”. It is unclear from the woman’s statement how many of her memories may have returned in this delayed form.

The woman says she “always remembered” the alleged rape, which she says took place in her room on the Sydney University campus while visiting the city for a debating championship when she was 16. But she also states that her Adelaide psychiatrist, Tony Davis, “confirmed that these are ‘somatic memories’ (i.e. lodged in the body rather than the brain, ­although the mind can access them)”. The woman says that on the night of the alleged assault she was “dissociating badly”.

She says the “surreal quality” of her memories suggests her drink might have been spiked while she was dancing earlier.

Lawyer Michael Bradley, who acted for the woman, said on ­Friday that questions about the ­nature of her memories ­demonstrated why an inquiry was ­needed. “All aspects of the evidence would be examined, and that would include anything that ­affects the veracity or weight that should be afforded to that evidence,” he said. The Weekend Australian sought a comment from Ms Thorncraft and Dr Davis but did not receive a response.