by Bri Lee
‘Holy shit,’ I said.
I asked him to wait for me while I dropped my files back in my office and de-robed, feeling strangely panicked. ‘What was the situation?’ I asked Jonathon as we travelled down together in the elevator.
‘Alcohol involved. In a bedroom. They’d been dating previously, I think, then she texted him to come over, but she said she didn’t want the intercourse. Didn’t realise until she went to a sex education and consent information course at uni that what had happened was rape. He gave evidence.’
‘Woah!’ I gasped—they never did.
‘I know, and apparently he was hugely arrogant. Someone told me he was saying stuff like, “Oh I broke up with her and didn’t even want her back but she kept begging me and so I went over and she totally wanted it.”’
My stomach sank at the gaslighting. The arrogance of this tone tweaked a memory of a case I’d come across in research where a young man said ‘we had sex’, but the oral sex was only performed on him until he ejaculated, and was completely unreciprocated.
The elevator doors opened and we all fell silent, and as we filed into the courtroom I realised I was sitting diagonally in front of the complainant. It couldn’t have been anyone else. She was about my age and flanked by people who could only have been her mother and father. I saw the mother holding her daughter’s hand, stroking it with her thumb, like my mum did for me whenever I was sick in bed or sweating through a migraine. The father looked stony. The world told him it was his duty to protect his daughter, and yet she had been violated and was now violated again, publicly; told she was a liar. I wondered how my father would look, sitting in the back of one of the courts in this building, maybe even this one, if Samuel made me go to trial. This father shared the same jeans and buttoned shirt as mine wore, right down to the careless brown belt with black shoes. My heart ached for him and I felt a little panic, remembering that coming forward would have ramifications for the people I loved. Perhaps I couldn’t put Dad through this.
‘That’s the defendant’s family,’ Jonathon whispered to me, barely audible, and gave a tiny point with his finger in his lap toward a row diagonally in front of us to the right, on the other side.
It was a row of several young men, all tall and square-shouldered, that ended with an older man and woman. The boys sat fidgeting, restless, jiggling with their legs spread wide over the sides of their chairs. The defendant was brought back in and looked over to them and nodded, firm, defiant, and the row nodded back at him. Those boys were the same, just like she and I were the same. Those boys feared being accused. Most of us have had sex while drunk; who’s to say, I could imagine them thinking, a girl doesn’t just change her mind the next morning when she feels guilty? This one did, but she waited over a year!
I didn’t hate them, but I loved her. I loved her for the same reason Australians love underdogs. I loved her because after growing up in Brisbane—with all the bullshit we hear and see and experience every single fucking day—to accuse a boy like this of rape was a gargantuan act of bravery.
A memory came back to me at that moment, while we were all sitting quietly waiting for the judge to arrive. I saw it with absolute clarity. I remembered being at a high school dance, and passing a girl and boy dancing close, and noticing she was crying. Kathy was a popular girl, and I wasn’t popular, and the boy was a football player I sort of recognised. I told the friends I had been with that I would meet them outside in a minute.
I found the crying girl’s group of popular friends and walked over to them, nervous. They looked like models with their straight hair, perfect skin and expensive jeans, and I was frightened of them. One saw me approaching and eyed me, sceptical as to why I might be crossing this normally sacred social divide.
‘Hey, I just saw Kathy dancing with a boy, crying,’ I said to none of them in particular, ‘maybe someone should go check on her?’
I thought that this would be all I needed to do, but as I turned away the dynamic of the group shifted. Nobody answered and nobody looked at me. I stayed, turning back, uneasy.
‘Do you know she’s crying?’ I asked again, confused. Again, no reply.
‘Al is being a dickhead,’ Lillie finally replied.
‘Okay, but she’s alright, though?’
A pause around the group again. I looked to Lillie and just stared at her, waiting.
‘We think maybe he’s doing stuff she doesn’t wanna do,’ Lillie said, quieter this time.
‘Shit,’ I said. ‘Is someone gonna go get her?’
Lillie looked to Caroline, who looked to Mel, but nobody answered my question, nobody volunteered.
I was still confused. ‘Do you want me to go get her?’ I offered lightly, confused, and they leapt on me.
‘Yes!’ they all replied, one even touching my arm as if to thank me, and many started talking at once about how ‘gross’ the boy was.
I went back into the crowded dancefloor where Al had taken Kathy, where you couldn’t see for the wall of sweaty bodies, and I tapped on his shoulder. My interruption was met with a mixture of surprise and disdain.
I shouted over the music, ‘I need to talk to Kathy for a minute,’ and in the moment of confusion I grabbed her hand from his shoulder and led her away. She followed, obediently and without question, and only now do I recognise her glassy eyes as The Freeze. I deposited her back with her friends and she still seemed in shock.
‘No worries,’ I said, shrugging off their thanks, and left, not wanting people to think I had been trying to hang out with them.
Later, at the end of the night when we were all waiting for our mums and dads to pick us up, Lillie came and found me. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘What you did was really brave.’
‘And do you find the defendant guilty or not guilty of rape?’ the associate’s—Alice’s—voice boomed out into the still air.
‘Not guilty,’ the speaker replied.
Behind me the girl let out a guttural noise. An injured cry that came from somewhere deep inside her. In front of me the young men clapped and shouted; one triumphantly punched a fist into the air. It was a confusing, contradictory surround-sound experience. The defendant turned and flashed his supporters a huge, sparkling smile. He didn’t see the young woman fall as she stepped from her chair, wailing. He didn’t see the father carry his daughter from the room, her mother holding the door open for them, watching her child crushed, the despair gushing from them all in clumsy waves before the doors shut behind them. I took it as a warning sign. Perhaps bravery wasn’t enough.
As I rode with the associates back in the elevator to our level, their chatter followed a predictable narrative. He certainly seemed like a dickhead, but being a dickhead doesn’t make you a rapist, but she couldn’t prove it anyway, and she waited too long, and besides, who feels drunk after two beers?
I listened. If the complainant’s story was true, I didn’t know how she could have possibly proved it; there weren’t cameras in her home. And if it was true, the same thing that made him feel entitled to her body, that same invisible pressure, is what stopped her from coming forward earlier. The odds were stacked against her from the beginning.
‘Imagine if that consent class had been taught earlier, while they were in high school, before this happened,’ I mused aloud. ‘Maybe it wouldn’t have happened?’
But most of the associates were peeling off, already chatting about weekend plans.
‘I think I get too worked up about this stuff,’ I turned and said to Jonathon, once all the others had gone. His temporary office in Brisbane was near mine.
‘Oh yeah?’
‘I dunno. I get too into it. I care. I think about things being unfair.’
‘Ah, but it’s not about fairness.’ He gave a sympathetic smile.
‘I know, I know. It just pisses me off, you know? Seeing the same bullshit everyday, all the worst stuff.’
‘You get a lot of the sex crime?’
‘Yeah, and the kid stuff. Don’t you? Or does
your judge do civil?’
‘Nah, we do a mix,’ he shrugged lightly, ‘but I’ve only been in a couple of nasty ones this year.’ He paused before adding, ‘But it also doesn’t get to me, not like what you’re saying. It’s the law. I feel like we’re helping people deal with that bad stuff. I’d care if I saw people misusing the law, or something, in a way that was unfair, but it’s what we do. We provide the legal system.’
‘But what if the legal system is unfair?’ I looked into his eyes, searching through the thick lenses of his glasses to see if he understood. That he might hear my question was a plead. But I felt silly, as though my frizzy red hair was a tinfoil hat. ‘Argh, I guess that’s above our pay grade,’ I smiled and shrugged, ‘see you tomorrow.’
The next morning I ran into Megan at the coffee cart, and a touch of happiness returned to me. I’d had too many cigarettes then horrific nightmares the evening before, unable to shake the image of that girl’s father carrying her from the courtroom. My stomach churned with a pre-emptive guilt as I looked up at the courts building, thinking of how selfish I’d have to be, to drag my parents through it all. But Megan made me happy. She was a jet of air-conditioning on a muggy Queensland afternoon. We shared outrage and disgust, but most of all we often shared confusion. Some things we saw, some of the horrific things people did, we would never be able to understand. Sometimes it’s important to hear your friend say that: I don’t understand. And sometimes it’s important to hear your friend say fun stuff. I wolf-whistled as I approached the coffee cart, Megan’s back to me. She whipped around and I gave her a dramatic wink, and she responded by overzealously flipping her hair.
‘Ready for another day in paradise?’ I said confidently.
‘Oh, can’t get enough of it!’ she shot back. I placed my coffee order and stepped away from the cart to stand with her, the two of us teetering on our heels between the pavers.
‘Your trial finished?’ I asked. Most sex trials took three days, so a Thursday often meant a jury was out, or there was a new list of work to be done.
‘Yeah, he got guilty but I think he’ll appeal,’ she replied, annoyed, ‘and now we’ve got a big child exploitation material sentence this morning.’
‘Jesus, you guys just can’t catch a break, can you?’
She rolled her eyes.
‘So you’ve got Commonwealth DPP rocking up?’ I asked. Child exploitation material (CEM) was dealt with under federal laws, not by the normal state prosecutors.
‘Yep.’
‘And the envelope shit?’ I asked.
‘Yep.’
‘I fucking hate those envelopes, hey.’
‘Yep.’
‘Have you ever seen the stuff?’ I asked, genuinely curious. At every CEM sentence the prosecution would tender an example of the defendant’s cache. The images were classified on different levels of heinousness—bondage and bestiality being some of the worst—and also for the levels of penetration and violence.
‘No, my judge barely even looks at it, and then he puts it in the envelope and seals it before handing it to me,’ she replied.
‘Yeah same,’ I said. ‘It’s always a relief.’
‘Yeah, and my judge has kids that age, you know?’ Her voice getting sharp, defensive. ‘I can’t imagine how he feels, seeing that stuff then going home to them. Anyways, let’s talk about something else. Did you hear what happened to Lizzie yesterday?’ Megan asked this after checking nobody was in earshot while we waited at the lights near Roma Street Parkland.
‘No?’ This was gonna be some good gossip.
‘Lizzie wore a skirt to work that came just above her knees, like, totally a normal and okay length, and her judge said she was unprofessional, and made Lizzie go to the city to buy stockings or a new pair of pants.’
‘Oh my god!’ I mouthed, my jaw wide open in outrage.
‘Yeah, then her judge was gone by the time she got back from the city anyway.’
I groaned. ‘How’s Lizzie holding up?’
‘Not good. She was in my office crying again yesterday after I got back from court.’
‘Ugh, you have more patience than I do.’ I shook my head. The green man flashed and we crossed the road. ‘This job is so shitty sometimes. I can’t imagine how awful it’d be if I felt like I couldn’t talk to Judge, or that we didn’t really get along.’
‘I know, let alone if he bullied me,’ Megan added, ‘and Lizzie tried to go to HR but they said there’s nothing they can do. She either stays or quits.’
‘Fuck!’ I said, too loudly, as we swiped our security passes and approached the elevators. ‘But if she quits it’ll ruin her career.’ I was whispering now, people all around us. Megan nodded and we rode up the elevator in silence, with other staff and the public around us. Right before we split, me to level thirteen and her to level fourteen, Megan added, ‘At least her judge is barely ever here,’ and we exchanged cynical smiles and parted.
True to Judge’s pre-emptive apology, the trial in Mandarin was slow agony. All the women had different gripes with each other, and it seemed as though they’d all dated each other at some point. Photos from the crime scene showed blood all over the defendant’s penis, and quite a lot of blood around the bathroom, but defence brought in an expert doctor to say that an erect penis can bleed out quite a lot from a tiny, otherwise insignificant cut. Defence was full of objections to the jury seeing too much of the blood, or being directed to consider it important.
The translator, to her credit, was phenomenal. She was fast and specific, and rarely needed the breaks Judge offered her. It was Thursday afternoon when all the evidence finished, and the jury began deliberating on the Friday.
‘I wonder what difference it makes,’ I asked Judge back in chambers that day, ‘if they go deliberating over the weekend?’
‘Oh, not much, I think. People have other things to do. I suspect they just get on with their lives like we all do.’
I wasn’t sure I agreed. Those jurors would walk to the train station and see schoolgirls yelled at on the street. They’d return to homes where women did most of the cooking and cleaning. Maybe their kids complained about Asians at school ‘getting all the good grades’. Their teenage sons were called ‘fags’ if they couldn’t ‘pull’. Maybe the male jurors got massages by Filipino women, and their mates made loud jokes about ‘happy endings’. They’d see barely any women in parliament, and Pauline Hanson running for re-election as one of the most visible women in politics. Many of the jurors would have seen or heard their mothers slapped or hit by their fathers. In Australia it was impossible for a man to rape his wife right up until the 1980s—until then he was perpetually entitled to her body. What a world of information the jurors have absorbed! Anything could happen in forty-eight hours.
But Judge was right, and I went on with my life over the weekend too. I had drinks on Friday night, I spent the weekend with Vincent and we had a beautiful lunch with his family, I bought some new clothes, I was happy. It wasn’t until Sunday evening, when I prepared my outfit for work, that I remembered I’d be returning to take that verdict. I went outside to have a cigarette and looked out over the rooftops of Paddington, feeling guilty for not caring enough. Worrying that I was hardening like I’d sworn I wouldn’t.
Monday morning began like it always did: Judge and I worked on things in our respective rooms, waiting for the phone call to say the jury had reached a verdict. It came after less than two hours, and we pulled on our robes and went down in the elevator together. I stood to take the verdict—not guilty—then tried not to think about the complainant, but as always I pictured her receiving the news. I wanted to try to feel that disappointment, to test if I was ready for it myself.
I finished up the paperwork and returned the file to the registry. The listings staff were glad to know we were available to start another trial the very next day, so I spent a few hours madly rushing around, gathering the depositions for Judge to read and prepare for. There was just such a backlog; always more
trials waiting to go. A never-ending tide of them, wave after wave, and only a tiny fraction of women ever complained, and only a tiny fraction of them ever even got a court date listed.
The new case was another sexual assault, but this time with the added element of deprivation of liberty. I had to go down to the filing room underground to pick it up straight from the source, whereas normally it would have been deposited into Judge’s pigeonhole for us. While I waited for the single folder I needed to be retrieved, I looked around at the rows and rows of filing shelves. People had to be trained to know how to store and find them because there were so many. The room was clean and cold, over-lit by fluorescent tubes, like a strangely silent hospital. I looked down at the carpet and imagined who might be in the cell right under my feet, remembering the tour I’d taken earlier in the year. If I’d been alone I might have got down onto my hands and knees and pressed my ear against the ground. Would I have heard a cough? A call of anger, or a call for help? Would it be a woman or a man? And how was this human different from me? How would my file look different from any of these thousands of files? It wouldn’t.
‘Here you go!’ the young clerk said to me, passing me the folder I was waiting for. ‘Sorry it took a while, there are a lot of people with that same last name.’
I never found out what the deprivation of liberty charge was all about. When I was preparing court the following morning, the prosecutor rushed up to me—it was Eric from Gladstone, saying they’d hit a snag.
‘It seems like we don’t have our main witness,’ he told me, and I waited for defence to mosey over before I said anything.
‘Do you mean late or not at all?’ I asked.
‘That’s what we’re trying to figure out at the moment,’ he replied. ‘We definitely can’t start at ten, but it’s a medical situation, so we’re trying to get in touch with her now and find out if this whole week is out or what.’
‘I’ll go tell his Honour, but I suspect he might want to come down at ten and have it on the record, what’s going on.’ I gave both men a nod and went upstairs to relay the news. Judge was frustrated. We’d both been back late the day before to prepare for something that might not eventuate.