Family rejects senator Lucy Gichuhi’s claims of violence

A self-published book by Lucy Gichuhi alleging domestic violence and betrayal has shocked her family.

Liberal senator Lucy Gichuhi. Picture: Tricia Watkinson

A self-published book by Lucy Gichuhi alleging domestic violence and betrayal has shocked her family, with her husband of more than 30 years angrily ­rejecting the claims and her youngest daughter questioning the book’s timing.

Fallout from the senator’s Behind the Smile: From the Slopes of Mount Kenya to Commonwealth Parliament of Australia comes as the 56-year-old faces an almost impossible task to be re-elected after a messy preselection battle saw her placed in the unwinnable fourth position on the Liberals’ South Australian ticket.

A recurring theme of the book is domestic violence, which Senator Gichuhi said she first witnessed within her family as a child in Kenya and which later became an issue in her marriage to William Gichuhi, to whom she remains married to today.

She recounted one instance, after the couple and their three daughters migrated to Adelaide in 1999 where William “charged at me like a raging bull and slapped me hard across the face”.

“It brought back memories of being in Kenya when William had hit me hard and slapped me around the face after an argument,” she wrote.

She also detailed how she caught William in bed with one of her seven sisters early in the marriage and how the affair was ongoing for several years.

“The process of writing has been liberating yet painful as I have had to relive traumatic ­experiences I thought I had buried,” Senator Gichuhi said.

She said she wrote the book, available on Amazon, to inspire young women “who have been crushed by life and almost given up on their dreams”.

But in an interview with The Australian, William dismissed its contents as a “litany of spurious lies, allegations and fabrications”. He challenged his wife to press criminal charges but not before she “fronted our daughters, looked them in the eye and told them why she spoke lies about their father (and) why has she dragged innocent people into this”.

“If it is true I have done these things I belong in jail. You don’t share a bed with an animal who sleeps with your sister, sleeps with other women, and then batters you,” William said.

The couple’s youngest daughter Joy, 21, said she had never seen her father be physically abusive. She also questioned the timing of the book.

“Other than money or political gain I don’t see any other reason why a mother and a wife would tear her family apart ­intentionally,” Joy said.

“It’s not just me defending my father, it’s a family-wide sentiment. No one believes it.”

Senator Gichuhi said she was unsurprised William, who wrote a foreword for the book despite being unaware of its contents, had denied the claims because “that is what an abuser will do”.

She said she never pursued criminal charges because she took the “appeasement road” in the hope the situation would remedy itself.

William said he and his wife were not talking despite living in the same suburban Adelaide house. The couple own six ­houses in Australia, as well as plots of land in Kenya.

Following the leadership vote that saw Scott Morrison become Prime Minister, Senator Gichuhi spoke out about bullying within the Liberal Party, although she later reneged on her promise to name those responsible. She said a planned second book would focus on her time in parliament.