by Anna Krien
I desperately did not want to replace Sarah with myself – to use a younger version of myself as a stand-in and my own experiences to explain hers.
And I’m hard on her, that younger version of me. I was too compliant, too inarticulate. Would this make me tough on Sarah? Was my judgment warped by my own experiences? Was it dangerous to write about this trial when Sarah was not present in court, let alone speaking to me?
Would I fill her absence with my own reflection?
And what about her, how did she perceive her absence? Sure, she had appeared by remote camera, the jury had seen her – but she wasn’t here.
*
Can you finish me off? It kept coming back to me, the familiarity of it. It summed up the flipside of a night that started off with wanting and being wanted and ended in being treated like a cum rag. And yet it was a question, wasn’t it? One you could say no to. That is, if you still had a voice, a solid sense of self. Perhaps there was a struggle in the alley, but is it possible the struggle was internal? What happened in the house – whatever side of the law it fell on – had seen the ground fall out from beneath Sarah’s feet. Was it conceivable that she had entered that bedroom a woman and left an object, an alchemical reaction from which Justin later reaped the benefits? Had she accepted – internalised – the objectification of her?
People talk about sex and power as if power is a seesaw, divvied up between two people. But in night games, where you come up against the power of a group, your sense of self dislocates. Power here can come in the form of a magnetism where no obvious violence, force or even threats are necessary. You just end up moving accordingly. Obediently.
Savannah Dietrich, the Kentucky teenager who outed her attackers on Twitter, was an anomaly. Before the trial she suffered enormously: suicide, she said, seemed a ‘friendly option’ and she cried herself to sleep. She was sixteen years old at the time of the assault, and her high school became a site of humiliation. She had no idea who or how many people had seen and passed on the photos of her unconscious, semi-undressed and being assaulted. But after going to the police – something she said she would not have done if the boys had apologised and told her, as she had asked, the names of the people they had shown the photos to – she summoned a rare strength that saw her not only choose to attend the trial but also to confront her attackers directly, speaking to them and trying to look them in the eye – something they avoided – when she gave evidence.
In a sense, Dietrich became empowered. Her presence during the trial made her unforgettable and indelible in the proceedings. The teenagers who assaulted her could not just walk away from her as they had that evening. Instead, they had to wear her presence, feel her anger and suffering, have her witness their shame as they had witnessed hers. If she had been absent, it would have been far easier for them to dismiss her as a ‘bitch’ or a ‘slut’ – and likewise, if she had avoided them, they could have loomed larger than life in her mind, morphed into monsters, young men with no chinks, no vulnerabilities. But instead she saw them broken, ‘damaged goods’ even – and herself as, in part, repaired.
Of course, it helped that her attackers pleaded guilty. Her word was not on trial. But still, by allowing Sarah to give evidence via remote camera, a screen that didn’t even include a sight-line to Justin in the dock, was this as helpful or protective as reformers had hoped it would be?
Instead it seemed to sustain any one-dimensional and dehumanised images the complainant and defendant might have of each other – and in essence, to make a trial only about its end result, not a process.
But the alternative would mean having to look your accused attacker in the eye. And it would also mean having to look your alleged victim in the eye.
On early Monday morning, when Sarah was due to continue giving her evidence, the location where she was to be hooked up ‘experienced technical difficulties.’ The only solution was to use the remote camera facilities in the County Court, where the trial was. Somewhere in the same building, she was to be placed in front of a camera and streamed into court – but the proceedings kept being put off.
How to get Sarah into the County Court without her crossing paths with Justin?
‘She dropped like a stone,’ a court volunteer had told me of a similar scenario. A woman coming to court to give evidence found herself in the same lift as her attacker. Each of them was flanked by lawyers and supporters, and one party had rushed to get in the lift before the doors shut. It was too late when they all realised the mistake, and as the lift elevated, she fell to the ground.
Is this what I am pushing for?
It seems heinous and cruel to suggest that a victim go through this – experience their attacker’s power over them again and again. But at the same time, I can’t help thinking that in certain cases something is lost, a truth is unseen, without a negotiated meeting of some sort.
‘Why is she doing this?’ Justin’s girlfriend Vanessa had asked me outside court when Justin went to the bathroom. It took me a moment to realise she was talking about Sarah. I paused.
‘Because she’s angry,’ I said finally.
Vanessa didn’t say anything, so I kept talking. ‘I mean, she was treated badly that night. I don’t know if she was raped, but even if she wasn’t, she’s got a reason to be angry.’
Vanessa looked at me in surprise, as if she had not contemplated my trying to see things through Sarah’s eyes. She moved away. When Justin emerged, his family looked at him, as they did each time he returned from the bathroom, checking to see if he was okay.
I tried to imagine Sarah here in the foyer, alongside the Dyer family, having to walk the gauntlet of their accusing eyes. I pictured her in the bathroom and glancing in the mirror as Justin’s mother or girlfriend walked in. And so too for Justin – he would have to withstand the rage and hate emanating from her supporters. It would hardly be pleasant. But at the same time, I thought, why were we all here, people who could never know for certain what happened in the alley, when one of the protagonists – one of the only two who did know – wasn’t? Maybe if Sarah and Justin saw each another again, each broken and angry, they might be able to admit something to themselves and negotiate a common truth that so far had not been forced to surface.
*
Could restorative justice play a part in dealing with sexual assault? Justice Marcia Neave thinks it could. A former chair of the Victorian Law Reform Commission, Neave oversaw substantial reform of sexual assault laws and yet remained disappointed at their limited effect on reporting and conviction rates. Speaking to the Age in 2011, she expressed her concern at the ‘very, very low’ conviction rates for sexual assault. Wrote journalist Farah Farouque: ‘These have fallen in recent years, from a conviction in about 50 per cent of cases that went to trial in the County Court to 38 per cent in 2009–10; in addition, guilty pleas have plummeted, and the number of victims who report sexual offences to the police is less than 20 per cent.’
Others, such as the barrister Peter Morrissey, have expressed frustration at sexual assault cases clogging up the courts in spite of the very low chance of conviction. ‘People are encouraged to want more out of the judicial system than what it offers,’ he told the ABC’s 7.30 Report in 2008.
Justice Neave has proposed an alternative of ‘restorative justice,’ whereby the complainant and defendant attend a conference chaired by an independent person to discuss the offence, its effect on the complainant and how redress could be sought. Restorative justice has the ambitious goal of changing the offender while also meeting the needs of the complainant.
It is a controversial suggestion, one that carries the risk of ‘re-victimising’ the complainant, with the offender able to excercise power over his victim once again, and one that may initially appear to feminists as a step backwards to a time when domestic violence and sexual assault were seen as lesser crimes and not taken seriously in court.
/> Yet the reflex objection that an offender is not being sufficiently punished if the case goes to a restorative justice conference instead of to court is superficial. After all, more often than not the accused leaves court in much the same physical state as they arrived: free. And if truly guilty, the offender is unaware of the impact of their crime and runs the risk of reoffending. On the other hand, an offender may find the process of having to speak to their victim much more difficult than sitting in court and leaving the talking to their barrister.
However, Justice Neave was well aware such a process would not suit all cases, emphasising that restorative justice would work alongside – not replace – the criminal justice system. But, she told the Age, she had spoken to many sexual assault victims over the years who were less concerned with retribution than they were with being acknowledged by their attacker and the system.
‘They want a voice in the process,’ said Neave. In an evaluation study, she quoted a woman who said, ‘I just wanted some sort of validation, someone to say, “Yes, it happened,” or for him to say, “Yes, it happened,” and then I would have been fine.’
Could this have worked for Sarah and Justin?
It was hard to tell, perhaps because their positions had solidified in the course of the criminal justice process. Justin was adamant he had done nothing wrong, while Sarah was convinced of his guilt – and one couldn’t help but wonder, whatever the trial’s outcome, if either party would emerge any the wiser.
PART 3
THE WINMAR MOMENT
CHAPTER 14
To this day, football codes around the world hold their post-game interviews in the locker room – and if footy is the last bastion of masculinity, then the locker room is the inner sanctum.
In America, when a Federal Court ordered equal locker-room access for female journalists in 1978, hostility towards women seemed merely to strengthen. Female reporters were accidentally ‘locked out,’ snubbed, called ‘perverts’ (while being slapped on the bum with wet towels) and subjected to numerous ‘jokes’ such as players urinating in front of them.
For the most part, the ‘fending off intruders’ approach worked. Unable to do their jobs properly and in the face of constant intimidation, few women stayed in sports journalism. But then, in 1990, came a watershed moment. Covering the US National Football League, a Boston Herald sports reporter, Lisa Olson, was trying to interview a footballer. She had requested for the interview to be held somewhere private, but the player insisted she meet him in the locker room. In hindsight, his response led Olson to suspect a concerted effort to intimidate her was planned.
As she began the interview, she heard another player call out, ‘She’s here again,’ and then a group of players, all naked, stood around her. One fondled himself, held his dick out and said, ‘Here’s what you want. Do you want to take a bite out of this?’ The other players echoed him. Another stood behind her, gyrating. ‘After a few minutes, I gave up trying to interview Maurice, thanked him and walked away. I felt total, blind rage,’ she told People magazine. A subsequent investigation saw Olson describe how the players ‘positioned themselves inches away from my face and dared me to touch their private parts.’
When Olson told her editor about the incident, she asked him to handle it quietly and diplomatically. This did not happen, and when a rival newspaper, the Boston Globe, ran a story on the incident, the owner of the New England Patriots, Victor Kiam, responded angrily. Kiam argued the Boston Herald had ‘asked for trouble’ by assigning a female reporter, and male news reporters overheard him calling Olson ‘a classic bitch.’ However, Kiam quickly went into damage control when women’s organisations threatened a boycott of his company, Remington, which sold women’s shaving products. He spent some $100,000 on full-page newspaper ads protesting his innocence, apologised to Olson and blamed the club administration for not briefing him properly.
Reluctantly, the US National Football League ordered an investigation into the incident after Olson, who described her experience as ‘mind-rape,’ brought a lawsuit. The investigation, which resulted in a 108-page report, concluded that Olson had been ‘degraded and humiliated.’ Fines were levied against the club and specific players (though a news report later revealed that the players’ fines were never collected).
A ‘watershed’ moment for female journalists, yes – but for Olson, despite winning a civil suit, the personal toll was immeasurable. Fans urged her to kill herself, made obscene phone calls, and sent her death threats, threats to rape her and threats to throw battery acid in her face. Her apartment was burgled, perpetrators leaving a note ordering her to ‘Leave Boston or die,’ and her car tyres were slashed, with a note left on the windscreen threatening, ‘The next time it will be your neck.’ ‘I can’t eat, I can’t sleep. It’s ruined my life,’ Olson told People magazine. When the Boston Herald offered her a transfer to Australia to work for the Daily Telegraph, she took it and fled.
*
Around the same time, Jacquelin Magnay was taking a similar stand. Before becoming a sports reporter at the Sydney Morning Herald in 1992, Magnay worked for a suburban paper, which included covering rugby league. ‘I’d covered St George, where Roy Masters was the coach. He was very welcoming, the photographer and I [both females] we’d go to their training and be treated as journos, but then we’d go to Cronulla and we’d have to psych ourselves up in the car, telling ourselves that this week was going to be different, that we could do it, that we could withstand the stares, the snarls, the spitting. But we persisted. It took about a year of horrible experiences until the Cronulla coach relented and realised that we weren’t going to go away. He started to invite us to talks and was very welcoming. But it took a year and I wouldn’t wish that on anybody.’
Travelling back and forth with her notepad, Magnay had her fair share of good and bad teams to deal with. By the time she joined the Sydney Morning Herald, she was a seasoned hand at navigating the mixed receptions at rugby clubs. ‘My reaction was to have no reaction. When I was interviewing the CEO of a club, one player got up on a table and started dancing in front of me naked. At Penrith, the coach had the press conference huddle standing in front of the showers, him facing us, so we would have to face the players in the showers. So I’d turn the coach around, so that we didn’t have to look at them. Naked players sometimes sidled up behind you. When I look back on it, I think, oh my god, that was sexual harassment to the nth degree. It was uncomfortable, awkward and intimidating, and for other people in the room to find that acceptable, then shame on them. I was a young journalist and they allowed that to happen.’
Magnay pushed on. ‘I’d established a protocol where I’d let the clubs know when I was attending their games, but my job was continually hindered by rugby league’s Balmain Tigers [now the Sydney Tigers], then coached by Alan Jones. At one Balmain game I told the doorman at the dressing room to let officials know I was there, but either the message wasn’t passed on or I was ignored. It meant that I missed the post-game interview and the opportunity to talk to the players, although I could talk to them an hour later when they came out of the rooms, but it was quite a time delay.’ By that time, the reporters from rival papers had filed their stories.
Unhappy that she had missed the press conference, Magnay’s editor wrote a letter of complaint to Balmain and organised with club management that the next time she was there, they would conduct the post-match interview outside the change rooms in the tunnel.
‘God, you must have felt like a leper,’ I interrupted.
‘Yes,’ Magnay said slowly. ‘And also you have to imagine I was quite a young journalist, and to take on the very senior rugby guys – very established names in the industry – was not insignificant.’
The next Balmain game was in Newcastle and Magnay had given the club two days’ notice she would be attending. ‘So I get there after the game, standing outside in this dingy, dark, horrible tunnel, and
everyone trots into the dressing room, including all male journalists, TV cameras, radio journalists. I knocked on the door and said, “Can you please let Alan know I’m outside?”’ She waited about ten minutes, then as someone else went inside, she peered in and could see Alan Jones holding his press conference huddle. ‘I called across the room and said, “Alan, I just want to let you know that I’m here. Can you please hold the press conference outside?”’
Jones stormed over to Magnay. ‘He berated me, saying I was carrying on like a temperamental schoolgirl and what right did I have to be there.’ Magnay stood her ground. As calmly as she could, she told Jones that she was taping everything he said. ‘He said, “Turn the tape off,” and I said, “No, everything you say is on the record.” Then, quite remarkably, he did a complete 180-degree turn and started to hold the press conference in the tunnel.’ By now Magnay was shaking, barely able to hear a word Jones said.
With the help of the media union, Magnay lodged a complaint with the Human Rights Commission. ‘I wanted to get a legal framework for what I was doing and what other females were attempting to do, and that was to be able to do our jobs properly.’ During the proceedings, a blood-spattered knife arrived in the mail for her. Several colleagues gave her the cold shoulder. ‘Going into the dressing room was seen very much as going into the inner sanctum,’ Magnay explained. ‘It was a privileged position to be in: they had access to this secret world of male domain, and they wanted that to remain. They didn’t want women there and they didn’t want anything to happen where they couldn’t get access.’ Other male journalists, however, were supportive. ‘A rival journalist actually helped me in the court case and filed supportive letters for me.’