The Anti-Defamation League
The decades long moral panic over sexual assault and sex abuse of minors, together with the triumph of me-tooist ideology and fuelled by it, has had at least three massive impacts on the justice system.
First, we have moved from a “never believe the complainant” position to an “always believe the complainant” position. The new version just as bad as the old.
Second, our offices of the Director of Public Prosecutions have given in and now routinely present the courts with very dubious, often literally unwinnable cases in matters of alleged sexual assault.
Third, there has emerged a whole class of males accused of sex crimes but never prosecuted, mostly reduced to the defamation courts in order to salvage their destroyed reputations.
Given number two, the cases referred to in number three must be very, very weak indeed. All three developments cause injustice on a grand scale and untold damage to the lives of many innocent (overwhelmingly) men. And all three are closely linked.
In view of Number Three, perhaps those concerned at the trajectory of the justice system in an age of a vicious, defamatory, unrelenting, dog-with-a-bone, me-tooist media should establish a new anti-defamation league, notwithstanding the endless controversy surrounding the first institution with that name.
Australia has been awash with accusations of sexual assault over the last decade or so. Many of the accused are high-profile figures. Think, Craig McLachlan, Geoffrey Rush, George Pell, John Jarratt, Christian Porter. To whom we can now add Bruce Lehrmann, reluctantly well-known after Brittany Higgins came on the scene. There are those, more obscure, who are not fortunate enough to obtain high-profile lawyers to support them. To save reputations, they have to sacrifice financial security, to mortgage everything they have ever owned.
Of course, Lehrmann is this week’s global ogre, following the “bombshell” decision of the Judge in his defamation case against Channel Ten and Lisa Wilkinson. Bombshell? More like bizarre. The judgement is a bit of a Murder on the Orient Express decision. They all did it! Lying, changing stories, covering up, harming others, making outlandish accusations. Bad witnesses.
Defamation law, we have just been powerfully reminded, has become a de facto criminal justice system, in cases where (mostly) the police clearly do not want to prosecute but others in the system, driven by a crusade against accused men, will do just about anything to drive the publicly accused to defend their refutations, or what is left of them. Defamation law is, as one legal practitioner has described it, “a roll of the dice”. For ideologically modish media “personalities”, it is now, clearly, worth the risk.
One journalist/advocate on the case is Bettina Arndt, roundly abused by all and sundry for her ongoing efforts. She has even arranged a conference on the subject of restoring the presumption of innocence. AND had the temerity to invite Lehrmann, to speak.
Some of the online hate speech against Arndt is worthy of mention.
“You need serious mental health treatment. Your tiny brain is utter mush. And by the way, despite years of desperately sucking up to them, most men loathe you anyway. Except of course, the abusers and murderers. They think you’re just the tops.”
Then there is this:
Let’s hope Lehrmann is in jail by June 1 [the date of the Arndt conference] and Bettina Arndt is locked in a room full of rapists and child molesters. What a horrible horrible (sic) woman. Wonder what wrong (sic) with her.
The lesson here – the fembots do play for keeps. Here is Arndt:
The petition to close down the conference was started by a professional advocacy group for survivors. Astonishingly they are calling on MPs Allegra Spender and Alex Greenwich plus the Woollahra Council to stop it from happening. Very revealing that the activists believe these particular local members of parliament would choose to close down a professional conference.
The reality is this noisy mob is tiny and far outnumbered by ordinary people who are applauding the fact we are holding a conference to address the very serious injustice occurring in this country. We’ve heard from many criminal lawyers and other professionals keen to participate.
It has also been sad to hear from families across the country whose loved one has been falsely accused:
“I saw today a disgusting article but it informed me about your upcoming event in June! It actually really hit home. My son was falsely accused of rape and he’s never been the same since. It ruined his life, he lost all his friends, his job and his mental health plummeted.”
Source: Bettina Arndt correspondence.
The Australian’s indefatigable columnist, Janet Albrechtsen, who has been so persistent in unpacking the Brittany Higgins farce, has also, more recently, become focused on the issue of DPP-generated weak trials. Particularly in New South Wales on the watch of Sally Dowling SC. Dowling’s own staff are disgruntled. The judges are banging on about the issue. The DPP seems unmoved. She has given in to pressure for a review, but expect little to change. The pro-complainant bias is deep and broad, and infests the political class before which public servants feel they must bow low.
Albrechtsen noted:
It is troubling that these issues arise in one category of case – sexual assault. The legal response to the #MeToo movement must not be a lower standard for charging to satisfy a drive to bring an unpopular group of defendants into court more easily.
The judges have referred to “meritless rape allegations” that are “doomed to fail”. Andrew Urban at Wrongful Convictions Report noted recently:
The day before the rape trial began last month, the complainant’s deception came to light: she had rehearsed a script for a phone call to manipulate the accused into making admissions to a rape that didn’t happen. Calls for a special commission to review decisions by prosecutors are growing louder, following several other rape allegations are found to be false.
The Judicial Commission of NSW (and of other states) hears complaints against judges. There is no similarly independent body to hear complaints about prosecutors. As yet. But following a string of stinging criticisms of rape prosecutions that got to court without a prospect of securing convictions, the pressure is growing.
https://wrongfulconvictionsreport.org/2024/03/09/rape-or-sour-grapes/
Urban calls it a “scandal”. He concludes, echoing Albrechtsen:
… sexual crime is now crimen exceptum – a crime so exceptional that the established rules of justice need not be applied to it.
Are false rape accusations really just sour grapes?
Indeed. Urban has written a book aptly called Presumption of Evil, about the case of one Noel Greenaway, yet another, lower profile victim of the emergent me-tooist legal system.
As per the Amazon book blurb:
Sociologists quoted in the book refer to this as a moral crusade.
The Spectator Australia published an article by Urban about the case covered in his book in 2023. He asks:
How can it be that a man of impeccable character in his late 70s is convicted of 28 nasty sexual and physical abuse offences between 1964 – 1973, simply on the say-so of half a dozen late middle-aged women who were juvenile delinquent inmates at an institution?
Because if you are named in the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, you are guilty, right? The legal process is just a formality. From the start you are referred to as an abuser and the complainants as victims.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/presumption-of-evil-displaces-presumption-of-innocence/
One of the judges who has expressed concerns in the Rum Corps State is Penelope Wass. Coincidentally, Judge Wass is quoted at length in another recent book on these matters, by John Fleming. His book is called Supreme Injustice: Guilty Until proven Not Catholic?
For Fleming is a Catholic (formerly Anglican) priest accused, and presumed guilty, of sex crimes in the court of South Australian public opinion, in this case by the Murdoch rag, The Advertiser. He has never been convicted in a court of criminal law, or even asked to front one. With Fleming’s career as an outstanding scholar and respected academic, and his reputation as a fundamentally decent man, trashed on the say-so of a couple of complainants, one in particular, and two sensationalist, backwater “journalists”, he sought redemption through the defamation process. He lost. Then he appealed, and he lost again. The High Court refused to hear his appeal to the ultimate legal authority in Australia. So, he has written a book about his case. The legal events took place around a decade ago. The events alleged by the main complainant were said to have occurred around half a century ago.
The book is timely, given all of the related legal goings-on referred to above. A review of John Fleming’s book requires its own article-length treatment, and this will appear here shortly.
All of these cases are attempts by those wrongly accused of sex crimes to restore something of their lives, reputations, careers and mental health. The defamation system has been allowed to sink into a series of costly, default criminal trials but, these days, without the twin protections of the presumption of innocence and the principle of “beyond reasonable doubt”.
These are important matters.
It behooves us all to remember on whose watch this went off the rails, and for what reasons. To remember Scott Morrison and Bill Shorten, who (strategically) said, “we believe you” in parliament, just before the second Pell trial, to remember Daniel Andrews, who said the same after the Pell High Court exoneration. To remember Louise Milligan, who broke every rule in the book on the presumption of innocence in order to advance her career and her ideology. To remember Channel Ten and its cowboy “journalism”. That the last prevailed (for now) is beside the point, entirely.
That no complainant about rape or child sexual assault was believed once upon a time is no argument that, now, they should all be believed, as a matter of course. We should be, in these “enlightened” times, be better than that. And saying so, as Bettina Arndt does on a regular basis, shouldn’t attract the ire of anyone, even the online goon-assassins who trash her. She, and her journalist peer, Janet Albrechtsen, should be lauded from the rooftops for daring to call out the catastrophic slipping of the judiciary from the high standards of yore into the mire in which we now find ourselves.
And not even a whacky court judgement on Lehrmann will change that. Just ask George Pell – well, it is too late for that – or John Fleming, or Christian Porter, or Geoffrey Rush, or Craig McLachlan, or John Jarratt, and (importantly) all of the less famous accused, about the travails of innocent men. Men who put their naïve, misguided faith in the defamation courts.
It is no country for innocent men, no more.
Paul Collits
18 April 2024
I am deeply disturbed by the verdict ‘on the balance of probabilities’ that Lehrmann is guilty. How does that constitute a guilty verdict based on evidence not probability. ‘Not proven’ is the best anyone could do. But sadly we don’t have that option. I was totally shocked the other night when Bolt after pointing out channel 10 and Lisa Wilkinson came off badly not being exonerated which is true, he then launched into - ‘you rapist Bruce Lehrman’ and continued on with more comment. The balance of probabilities is not something you can base an accusation lke that or Justin Quill’s dreadful tirade against Bruce Lehrman. I don’t know and nobody will know what happened and that is all we can say. The presumption of innocence needs to be restored.
Re the Higgins / Lehmann fiasco - All this expensive trouble could have been avoided if they had both been given a a swift kick in the backside out of their jobs. They were both at fault.
And the judge in the defamation case stated that Higgins had definitely been raped. How the hell would he know?
Just another clown show to add to the already extensive collection.