Extract from The Guardian
Court publishes 31-page document first sent to Scott Morrison containing allegations the former attorney general strenuously denies.
Christian Porter denies the allegations contained in a dossier, first sent to Scott Morrison and now published by the federal court.
Last modified on Thu 24 Jun 2021 23.11 AEST
A dossier of rape allegations against former attorney general Christian Porter, which was sent to the prime minister Scott Morrison earlier this year, has been made public for the first time, including allegedly contemporaneous diary entries.
On Thursday the federal court released the entire 31-page document which was first circulated to a group of politicians including Morrison, Labor’s Senate leader Penny Wong and Greens MP Sarah Hanson-Young in February.
The ABC’s reporting of the dossier sparked the now-former attorney general, Christian Porter, to commence defamation proceedings against the public broadcaster. The case has now been discontinued, despite Porter failing to secure an apology from the ABC.
The dossier has been circulated amongst politicians and members of the media since it was first released. Although parts of it have been published, it had not been widely seen until the federal court published the document on Thursday evening.
Released on the first anniversary of the woman’s death – she took her own life in 2020 – the dossier details her allegation that Porter raped her three times in the early hours of 10 January 1988.
Porter has strenuously denied the claims. Before he launched the defamation case against the ABC the former attorney general held a press conference in Perth in which he insisted that he “did not sleep” with the woman.
“We didn’t have anything of that nature happen between us … I can say to you all it didn’t happen,” he said.
The document contains a number of graphic claims, including that the woman was raped by Porter on three occasions after they had been out dancing at a hotel in Sydney’s Kings Cross. The woman and Porter were both in Sydney in 1988 competing in the World Universities’ Debating Championships.
In the document, the woman alleged that after their night out, Porter propositioned her for a “pearl necklace” which she agreed to despite not being aware of what it was.
“I did understand that it was a sex act of some kind,” she wrote.
The document, written by the woman before her death, states that Porter complained that she “couldn’t leave [him] with blue balls”, and forced her to perform oral sex on him despite her verbal protests. She alleged that after she vomited on herself, Porter offered to “clean” her.
In the document, the woman claimed that Porter helped her bathe, brushed her teeth and “shaved my legs and under my arms”. She wrote that he then dressed her before they fell asleep. She then alleged that she woke up to Porter anally raping her while she was lying face-down and naked, an act she described as “violently shocking”.
She alleged that, “shortly afterwards”, Porter raped her a third time.
“When I woke up later that morning … all I could cope with, as I remembered parts of the night before, gingerly, was the idea that things has gone ‘a bit too far’ with CP, the previous evening,” she wrote.
“But it was OK, I reassured myself, because we were going to get married – one day.”
The documents released on Thursday were part of a case brought by a friend of the woman, Jo Dyer, to stop high-profile silk Sue Chrysanthou, SC, from representing Porter in his now-defunct case against the ABC.
The four-day hearing was brought by Dyer in her attempt to restrain the star silk from acting for Porter over what she said was a conflict of interest arising out of a meeting between the two women in November last year.
Dyer was successful, with justice Tom Thawley ordering Chrysanthou to relinquish the brief after agreeing she had received confidential information which was relevant to the case and could present a “danger of misuse”.
Other documents released by the federal court included the full transcript of Dyer’s interview with Four Corners journalist Louise Milligan last year. In it, Dyer states that she believed the woman’s account when she was told decades later in part because it was “so consistent and so detailed”.
“And there was no reason for [her] to invent a story like that, at all, let alone with the detail that it included,” she said.
“I believed the story. Secondly, really, the incident as she described it was not ... the acts that she described were not something that a 16-year-old virgin would consent to. So there was no ambiguity, it seemed to me, as to whether or not this was a consensual act that got out of hand or anything of that nature.”
Dyer has become a key figure in the push to mount an independent inquiry into the allegations against Porter. Earlier this month she threatened to sue Porter for defamation over comments he made during a press conference which she claims “impugned my honesty and integrity”.
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