Literary agent Jeanne Ryckmans met a charming academic and landed in her own stranger-than-life tale
Storytelling is Jeanne Ryckmans’ life. So, what happens when a professional yarn peddler meets an adept yarn spinner who claims to be close to George Pell and the RBA governor?
She has, of course, heard plenty of tales. Storytelling is Jeanne Ryckmans’ life, and in a career spanning multiple decades and professions – literary agent, publisher, TV presenter – some stories have proven to be more credible than others. There have been tomes by acclaimed writers including Blanche d’Alpuget and Don Watson, and the satisfying glow that can accompany their publication. And then there’s Norma Khouri, whose lies in Forbidden Love, her now discredited account of a fatal attraction in Jordan, were uncovered during Ryckmans’ tenure at the disgraced writer’s publishing house.
Almost 20 years on, the sting of that literary hoax still lingers for Ryckmans, even though she was more witness than participant. No one likes to be caught out, especially when your business is committing words to print, so Ryckmans is passionate about the imperative for an accurate “bullshit detector” to sniff out ruses. The problem, as she points out on a brilliant blue sky day beside Sydney Harbour, is that “it’s within human nature to trust. So if you tell me a story, unless proven otherwise I will believe it”.
And so it was when this professional yarn peddler met an adept yarn spinner. Yes, Ryckmans was cautious when she was first approached by the stranger, but she was also intrigued – and no amount of experience or finetuning of her own bullshit detector could prevent her from being thrust into a leading role in her own, unlikely story.
“The view that truth is not a conclusion, but a premise – and the very condition for any intellectual inquiry – is important and profound.” The acclaimed Sinologist Pierre Ryckmans uttered these words during his 1996 Boyer Lecture. A generation later, it’s a truism to which his daughter still clings steadfastly.
Truth may be Jeanne Ryckmans’ polestar. But trust was almost her undoing. “The oft-repeated phrase is ‘How did an intelligent woman such as yourself…?’” she says of her own story, which began unexpectedly in mid 2016. “But it has nothing to do with intelligence … it’s the supreme talent of the huckster.” Cast a big enough lie, she has learned, and it will be believed, especially if a few crumbs of truth are tossed in.
Chapter one for Ryckmans began with an unsolicited WhatsApp message seven years ago. An Irish academic, whose name she will no longer utter because of the terrible end to their association, sent her a Yeats poem and asked her if she recognised it. When she replied that she did, he endeared himself by telling her that she clearly had a way with words.
He said he was a professor of law at an Australian university – which, it turned out, he had been but was no longer. Much later she would learn that she was not the first stranger he had contacted unprompted. “He used every available platform to contact men or women he thought could be useful in terms of networks, because he was always wanting to look into the next project.”
In their initial exchanges he was enchanting and well informed, wondering aloud if their paths had crossed in Paris, where Ryckmans had lived years earlier, and even mentioning that her late father, whose pen name was Simon Leys, had been a question on a final university exam. “I used to joke, ‘Is there a drone above my head? How does he know so much?’ But of course it’s very easy to get information about people these days.” Flattered and curious, she Googled him, and it seemed that he was indeed who he claimed to be. “He checked out,” she says, “because on YouTube there were these [university] videos [of him].”
His litany of stories suggested an adventurous life, from an illustrious career as an investigative TV journalist (which ended thanks to threats to his life after a documentary series on collusion), to being hounded out of Northern Ireland by the IRA, a stint as a DJ, a lost year in China, and, more recently, a position as a distinguished scholar awarded a record number of research grants at an Australian university. By the time he contacted Ryckmans, he was living “in exile” in the UAE.
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“It’s within human nature to trust. So if you tell me a story, unless proven otherwise I will believe it”
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Aside from a complex personal life – multiple failed relationships, estrangement from most of his children, and an intense dislike of his late mother – he seemed well connected, claiming close contact with, among others, Cardinal George Pell and the governor of the Reserve Bank. In one early conversation, when Ryckmans mentioned she had a friend who worked at the same university, he said he knew that friend well, and Ryckmans felt reassured. “He seemed to have enough information.”
There were holes in his story at times; Ryckmans struggled, for example, to fathom a link between the Global Financial Crisis, which he insisted had partly caused the failure of his first marriage, “and the madness and failings he attributed to his first ex-spouse”. But ultimately his charm, and her trust, triumphed. She agreed to meet him at an up-market hotel for a drink during one of his visits to Sydney in mid 2016. She found a small, bespectacled man carrying a book; he was “disarmingly open, articulate and charming … I was captivated and flattered by his attention. He described himself as a ‘distinguished professor of ethics’ who specialised in ‘trust’.”
While she fancied his Northern Irish cadence and the way he conversed, “as if he were delivering an eloquent and well-rehearsed speech”, she was also unsettled. “I thought he was very odd at the very first meeting,” she says now, a sense reaffirmed when she heard him later promising to her brother “that I will never lie to your sister”. Why, she wondered, did he feel the need to make such a promise, when she figured that truth, like trust, was a given?
“You have that little voice that niggles at you … It’s the voice that keeps us safe, the bullshit detector, but again these stories were so curated, and if you’re leaving little crumbs of truth they seem very [real].”
So, although she was still a little wary, she did start to trust him, and in late 2016, just a few months after meeting in Sydney, she flew to the UAE to spend time with him. “I had lowered the drawbridge of my natural defences,” she concedes; a friend joked that she was “a softie for someone who knew how to spell and punctuate”.
She spent a week with him in the UAE, where, despite her lack of initial attraction, his “romantic intensity”, combined with his ease and candidness, began to grow on her. She liked when he told her: “I am not over-processing, but I have never ever woken to a Polaroid image of a person. This happened to me three times last week. They are all of you. They are all chaste. And they are all real.” And when he suggested, during her stay, that she fly from there with him to a small island off the coast of Ireland, where he had spent his childhood summers and where he planned to build his dream home, she agreed. He referred to the small, treeless speck as “my island” and said he had never taken another woman there.
“I wouldn’t say it was a relationship. I think it was a connection of convenience,” she says. She felt fleeting moments of happiness. “But it never did seem quite real. It seemed curated, but I kept stifling that voice, because if I ever expressed doubt he would look wounded: ‘You’re a kind person, how could you not believe this?’” So when he told her, say, that he had been offered a job as a male model “and I’m thinking you look like Mr Bean”, she said nothing. “Was I happy? I would say I was charmed. Happiness I equate with peaceful contentment. I had this livewire, fast-talking storyteller. I was intrigued.”
He was not just intriguing, however. Ryckmans also found him erratic and unreliable, berating her, say, for not meeting him at Melbourne airport when she lived in Sydney, sending her a stream of angry messages, then offering to buy her a dog the following weekend, and accusing her of being selfish when she said she would not be able to care for a pet at that time.
She was troubled that he appeared to be almost friendless, that he sometimes inexplicably disappeared for days, that he would rant about receipts that need to be filed, and that he often racked up all manner of charges to his university credit card while at other times seeking money to fund his extravagant lifestyle, which included travelling widely, usually in first or business class.
In late 2016 he abruptly left the UAE, for reasons, Ryckmans was later told by the university, that “remain an HR matter”. He moved to Melbourne to set up a centre of excellence specialising in trust at yet another university – which would eventually investigate him over allegations of deception and fraud, including misuse of a corporate credit card and expenses, which over one two-month period amounted to almost $100,000. By the time he left that university – his fifth such position in a decade – Ryckmans decided to distance herself from him. “All of this behaviour, it was so erratic and chaotic and it made me uneasy.”
And then in the winter of 2018 he appeared on her Sydney doorstep. Could he stay until he found a new university job? She felt deeply uncomfortable, but when he threatened that he would otherwise kill himself, she relented. He remained under her roof for almost 18 months.
Ryckmans’ home was no longer her sanctuary. Wary of his increasingly erratic behaviour, as he sought jobs and ran out of money and insisted that her home was his safe space, she became fearful and began to tiptoe around him. She socialised with friends only when he was out. She began to feel like a hostage in her own home, to which he contributed nothing.
Several times he bought one-way tickets to Ireland, only to cancel them for various reasons. Many times, if she pushed him to leave, he threatened to kill himself. With a creeping sense of anxiety, she developed insomnia, and it lasted for the duration of his stay.
One morning in late 2019, when he had been in her home for well over a year, he told her that he had just nine dollars left in his bank account. Assuming he had managed to maintain his once lavish lifestyle courtesy of an inheritance or family fortune, she had never really pried into his finances. Now he was on unemployment benefits and selling off his possessions. She returned home one evening to find that he had thrown a large, framed sketch of Ryckmans – a gift from a former boyfriend – onto the bed. He did not like that in her home, he said; it was insulting and hurtful to him. So he had covered it with yellow sticky notes and in blue pen had scribbled: “Sleep with your f. king ghosts.”
She wanted him to leave. She told him she could no longer afford to loan him money, and he chased her with a filleting knife. Trying to grab her mobile phone, he crash-tackled her and slammed her onto the bathroom tiles. When, in December 2019, she told him “it was all over”, that he had to go and that she had his packed bag ready to be collected, he screamed abuse and hurled a ceramic garden pot at her, tearing her rotator cuff and lodging a shard of ceramic in her lip. He was charged with assault occasioning actual bodily harm and malicious damage to property. Police assured her he would be convicted. Months later, the charges were dismissed and he was ordered to comply with various conditions. Ryckmans has never seen him since.
She did, however, confirm to the Australian Financial Review several years ago that she had been left with ongoing injuries as a result of an alleged assault by Justin O’Brien, a jetsetting professor specialising in trust whose professional life had collapsed amid claims of unethical conduct and unpaid bills. (He could not be contacted for this story.) “Trust,” Ryckmans told the paper in 2021, “is a nebulous concept.”
She does not consider herself a victim. She was, she says, in the wrong place at the wrong time; later she uncovered similar accounts of other women who had also encountered the same man. “I think I was just one in a long conga line,” she says. “I think I was useful because he was leapfrogging.”
The lies and deception shocked her, but not everyone. “Most people just say, ‘Move on, nothing to see here.’” But while Ryckmans was shaken, she remains resolute on one thing. “It’s human nature that we will always trust,” she says firmly. “I don’t wish to be cynical.”
Trust: A fractured fable by Jeanne Ryckmans (Upswell) is released August 3.
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