Kimberley child sex offender and former fugitive Charles Batham pleads guilty to 34 charges

Sam Tomlin, Joanna Menagh, and Erin Parke - 25 June 2021

A child sex offender who fled northern Western Australia and spent nearly a decade on the run overseas has admitted his crimes.

Former tourism operator Charles Gordon Batham fled Broome in 2011, after he was charged with more than 30 child sex offences, relating to a period between 2007 and 2010.

He was able to flee Australia, flying to Malaysia and onto Europe, before remaining at large for nearly a decade.

But an ABC investigation published in February last year resulted in a string of sightings and tip-offs.

The fresh information led police to northern Italy, where Batham was arrested and from where he was extradited last year.

WA Police Detectives travelled to Italy at the height of the initial COVID-19 outbreak, escorting Batham to Perth, where he has remained in custody ever since.

Appearing in the Perth Magistrate's Court today, Batham pleaded guilty to 34 charges, including sexual penetration of a child, indecently recording a child and encouraging a child to engage in sexual behaviour.

He was remanded in custody, and is due to face the Perth District Court again in August, when a sentencing date is expected to be set.

Well-known Broome tourism operator

At the time of his initial arrest and flight from Australia, Batham was a well-known figure in Broome, running a business taking tourists on ultralight aircraft tours over Cable Beach.

He lived in a converted double-decker bus and regaled locals with stories about his travels in Africa and the Middle East.

The news has been met with relief in the town of Broome, where the offences occurred.

'Huge relief' for victims

Broome resident Robyn Maher first met the tall Englishman in the 1990s, when she was working in the town's tourism industry.

She helped the ABC with the 2019 coverage that resulted in Batham being located in Europe.

"I think it's fantastic news that he's pleaded guilty, as it means the victims don't have to go through the court process," Ms Maher said.

"It will be a huge relief for everyone, and I'm just so glad he got caught.

"It was so frustrating that he just left town and felt he got away from it."

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-25/broome-paedophile-pleads-guilty/100245754

Nicholas Emmanuel Athans: DJ jailed for ‘persistent’ grooming of underage girls on social media

A DJ and event promoter has been handed a jail term for his ‘persistent’ offending in grooming underage girls on social media.

Emily Cosenza - JUNE 25, 2021

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A South Australian DJ and event promoter who groomed underage girls for sex has been jailed for at least a year and three months.

Nicholas Emmanuel Athans was found guilty of four counts of procuring a child to engage in or submit to sexual activity during a judge-alone trial in January this year.

The 26-year-old pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Athans, of Ridleyton, contacted the four girls privately after he found them through his Facebook business page Yeah Hard Entertainment between April 2016 and July 2017.

During his trial, the court was told he also used the Snapchat messaging app to send photos of his exposed genital area as well as photos of him in his Calvin Klein underwear.

At the time, he was aged between 21 and 22, while the victims were aged between 14 and 16.

The pedophile fronted the Adelaide District Court on Friday and was sentenced to one year and eight months jail, with a non-parole period of one year, three months and seven days.

Judge Sophie David said the victims described the images as “graphic” and caused them “a level of unease, discomfort or disgust”.

Over the course of Athans’s 15 months offending, the court was told he also sent a meme to one victim that showed a person sitting on a jet ski with a caption that read: “When you want some head so you jetski out in the middle of nowhere and you tell her to suck it or swim back.”

“There was a persistence to your offending,” Judge David said.

“These images were attended by sexual or flirtatious comments and/or requests to meet up in person with the complainant with whom you were communicating.”

The court was told Athans was first arrested and charged in February 2017 over allegations made by the initial two victims and was granted bail, which he breached because he used social media and worked with children.

After being sentenced to seven days in jail, he was subject to a home detention bail agreement, where he couldn’t access any device connected to the internet.

The predator again breached those conditions by possessing a mobile phone.

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Judge David made numerous references to Athans having a close relationship with his family and being supported by them.

A psychological report was cited by the judge that found Athans suffered from depressive symptoms.

“(The psychologist) said that the charges have brought shame and guilt to bear upon you and created distress for you and your family,” the judge said.

Athans also suffers from “severe” Bell's palsy – a form of temporary facial paralysis or weakness on one side of the face that causes drooping or stiffness – which he developed in August 2019.

Judge David said services, like private neuro-physiotherapy, required to treat the condition were accessible within the corrections system.

She found there were no special circumstances to grant the Athans a suspended sentence or a home detention order.

“I cannot ignore that count one is not an isolation aberration or incursion into criminal offending but occurred in the context of further similar offending by you against three other complainants.

“You have taken no responsibility for the offending, and you continue to maintain your innocence.

“It is also not unimportant that social media is pervasive in our society, and other young persons must be deterred from using social media in the manner you did to commit these harmful acts.”

When establishing a non-parole period, Judge David said Athans qualified as a serious repeat offender and was not satisfied that the predator’s circumstances outweighed community protection and personal deterrence.

She added that Athans’s fourth count of offending was committed while on bail for earlier offending, which was a “blatant” breach.

“It is difficult to have any real confidence in your prospects of rehabilitation," she said.

“In those circumstances I cannot say that your personal circumstances are so exceptional as to outweigh the considerations of the protection and safety of the community and personal general deterrence.”

In Athans’s previous appearance, Marie Shaw QC, for the defence, argued that her client was not much older than his victims at the time of his offending and should be handed a home-detention sentence instead of a jail term.

“The defendant was 20 years of age at the time of his first offence and … the circumstances of the alleged victims’ ages, and age difference (between them and Athans), makes it appropriate for home detention to apply, and (he) was not in a position of authority,” Ms Shaw told the court in May.

https://www.news.com.au/national/south-australia/nicholas-emmanuel-athans-dj-jailed-for-persistent-grooming-of-underage-girls-on-social-media/news-story/53050e44e23407039332afb31cce78f1

University of Adelaide rocked by damning sexual harassment report

DAVID PENBERTHY - JUNE 24, 2021

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The University of Adelaide has been rocked by a damning report into a culture of sexual harassment and will establish an Integrity Unit separate from its human resources department to better deal with allegations of misconduct, bullying, discrimination and abuse.

UA Governing Council has also issued a formal and unreserved apology “to all individuals who have experienced sexual assault, sexual harassment, bullying or other unacceptable behaviour while on University premises or in the course of activities for which the University was responsible”.

The new claims of harassment and misconduct are contained in an independent KPMG report which the University commissioned last year following the scandal over former Vice-Chancellor Peter Rathjen, who was found by ICAC to have groped two women at an alumni function and had an inappropriate relationship with a third.

ICAC also found that Rathjen lied about his misconduct and his departure prompted many staff and students to ask how he had got away for his misbehaviour for so long.

In response to the ICAC investigation the UA Council and new Vice Chancellor Professor Peter Hoj commissioned KPMG Australia to conduct an independent survey which received submissions from 664 members of the UA community, of whom 351 were staff and 289 students.

This ranged from “unwelcome remarks about hairstyle and dress” and offensive conduct such as unwanted hugs, up to “evident sexual misconduct” including inappropriate touching, grabbing and kissing, and the most serious category, “egregious sexual misconduct”, which covers coercion, sexual abuse and assault.

The report says KPMG also heard other allegations involving the use of abusive and insulting language, bullying, spreading misinformation, unwanted attention, favouritism and failures to declare conflicts of interest.

It says staff and students told KPMG that they felt the university did not have clear policies covering misconduct and that they had little or no confidence in the systems in place to protect them.

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Professor Peter Hoj told The Australian that he found the report “shocking” but that the university was determined to change its culture and put new processes in place to prevent future misconduct.

“It is a very detailed, deep look at what’s happened and what they think we have to do so that things that happened in the past can’t be repeated,” Professor Hoj said.

“Zero is the only number that’s acceptable. It is very, very disappointing and you could say shocking how big a proportion of people who felt victimised felt that we had not engaged with them in the appropriate way.”

“Some felt let down, others were even distressed by how we dealt with them. That is one of the things that we really have to remove.”

The KPMG report makes 22 recommendations – all of which have been accepted – and their implementation will be led by the Chair of the University’s ICAC Response Steering Committee, Professor Katrina Falkner.

Professor Falkner told The Australian that she was particularly troubled that staff and students had told KPMG they were reluctant to come forward with allegations of misconduct.

This was why the university would immediately embrace the proposed creation of an arms-length Integrity Unit separate from its HR department as a central contact point for the investigation of complaints.

“Some members of the community have indicated they don’t feel safe coming forward with concerns either as bystanders or as people who have experienced things themselves,” Professor Falkner said.

“That is clearly very disappointing and very concerning. Because our community was so brave to share their experiences, they have told us what we need to do. Making changes to process, structure and culture will lead to a system that stops these things from happening again.”

Professor Hoj said it was his understanding that the university had not recorded any cases of sexual assault in the past two years.

Over that same period there were 18 documented cases of sexual harassment, 10 of them in 2019 and eight in 2020.

Professor Hoj said it was possible that other past cases could emerge if UA staff and students had more confidence in the reporting processes.

“We want people to be very comfortable in reporting,” he said. “In terms of university-related incidents it is our best understanding that the reported number of sexual assaults in 2019-2020 was zero.”

“But what we need to acknowledge is when you have procedures and processes that are not streamlined, we can’t be sure that everything that happened is reported.

If all this works really well, until such time that the culture change is perfect, we could well see that more people feel comfortable in reporting.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/university-of-adelaide-rocked-by-damning-sexual-harassment-report/news-story/073c175061054c69f4d1d18bd2b2303f

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Ben Roberts-Smith in fiery exchange with Channel 9 lawyer

Candace Sutton - JUNE 24, 2021

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Ben Roberts-Smith has engaged in a fiery exchange with the lawyer for Channel 9, calling accusations he cheated on his bravery medal to cover up killing a teenager “disgusting”.

Sensational allegations were made on day six of Ben Roberts-Smith’s cross-examination suggesting had “exaggerated” his bravery to win a medal and had really just shot an unarmed teenage boy.

Nine newspaper’s lawyer alleged Mr Roberts-Smith’s act of bravery, in Afghanistan’s Chora Valley in 2006, was fictional and covered up a campaign of bullying of a young soldier who knew the truth.

In the Federal Court, Nicholas Owens SC said Mr Roberts-Smith had given untrue accounts of the engagement to media and in an interview with Australian War Memorial historian Dr Peter Pederson.

Mr Roberts-Smith agreed that he had “conflated” more than one battle when giving his account of the incident which won him his MG, but had not meant to.

Mr Owens retorted: “You only did that because you didn’t want the public to think the engagement for which you won the Medal of Gallantry (MG) was for shooting an unarmed teenager”.

Mr Roberts-Smith: “Not only do I find that a disgusting comment, it’s completely false.”

In a barrage of accusations on Mr Roberts-Smith’s sixth day of cross-examination and eleventh day in the witness box, Mr Owens suggested the wording of the MG citation was false.

The war veteran was awarded the MG four years before he earned his Victoria Cross, and the medal’s citation states that an Afghan militia attempted to outflank Mr Roberts-Smith’s patrol.

The citation says that he “ensured that his patrol remained secure by holding this position without support for twenty minutes”.

Mr Owens put it to Mr Roberts-Smith that he hadn’t held the position for 20 minutes alone because he had been joined by Person 1, a soldier the war veteran is accused of bullying.

Denying the suggestion, the veteran said he believed he had been awarded the medal for pushing “out the front by myself”.

Described as a “small and quiet soldier”, Person 1 had jammed his minimi machine gun while on the mission.

Mr Owens accused Mr Roberts-Smith of thereafter physically assaulting and abusing Person 1 and calling him a “useless c*nt” and threatening to kill him, which Mr Roberts-Smith denied.

He agreed that in a subsequent media interview and the discussion with Dr Pederson, he mixed up details of the engagement with later battlefield incidents.

“I’ve conflated that with something that happened later in the day,” Mr Roberts-Smith told the court.

“It happened after a number of tours. I acknowledge those mistakes.”

Mr Owens said Mr Roberts-Smith had plagued Person 1 with bullying comments and had invented a scenario in which the young soldier woke up with “night terrors” pointing a machine gun.

Mr Owens put it to Mr Roberts-Smith that it was he who had pointed his gun at Person 1, and his bullying had escalated after the Chora Pass mission because the young soldier knew about the unarmed teenager.

Mr Roberts-Smith said none of those suggestions were true and “I just didn’t trust Person 1 with my life and that’s a dangerous thing in Afghanistan”.

In earlier evidence on Thursday, Mr Roberts-Smith took a swipe at his ex-wife Emma, after the contents of a text message between Ms Roberts-Smith and her best friend were revealed in court.

The war veteran’s defamation trial heard on Thursday morning that Emma Roberts-Smith had texted her school friend and divulged a conversation between her then-husband and an SAS comrade.

The text message, sent on May 9, 2018 by Emma Roberts-Smith to Danielle Scott, followed a conversation the night before her ex-husband had with a soldier known as Person 5.

Person 5, who had been Mr Roberts-Smith’s patrol commander had just appeared before an inquiry into Australian soldiers in Afghanistan.

The court heard that Emma Roberts-Smith texted Ms Scott, writing “Hey mate, (person 5) rang BRS late” and included a sad face emoji.

She then texted: “he was grilled for hours. Lots of questions about (Ben Roberts-Smith). He didn’t get much sleep.

“It is obvious someone said a hell of a lot about Ben. They still have to be able to prove it.”

Both Ms Roberts-Smith and Ms Scott are due to testify against Mr Roberts-Smith at the trial in coming weeks.

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Asked by Nicholas Owens SC, for Nine newspapers, if he had not been breaking the law by discussing Person 5’s testimony to a confidential national inquiry, Mr Roberts-Smith said he hadn’t discussed the contents of the testimony.

He also denied telling his then-wife that the Director General of the Australian Defence Force (IGADF) inquiry into what SAS soldiers did in Afghanistan would “still have to be able to prove it”.

“It looks like she is forming her own opinion, which is reasonably typical about my ex-wife,” Mr Roberts-Smith told the court.

“I probably was a bit frustrated and upset.

“I told my wife they were questioning my awards, because that’s what I believe was happening.”

Mr Roberts-Smith also told the court his ex-wife “went through my email account and went through deleted and junk folders” to retrieve emails he thought he had got rid of.

The emails contained possibly sensitive material which Mr Roberts-Smith said his ex-wife had then given to the media lawyers.

Mr Owens grilled Mr Roberts-Smith over a Tupperware container filled with USB sticks, which the ex-soldier said had been anonymously sent to him after he asked comrades for images of their Afghanistan missions.

The media lawyer produced two photographs he claimed showed where the USB container had been buried by Ben Roberts-Smith in the backyard of his matrimonial home on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland.

The first photo, taken at 2.06pm on June 5, 2020 the location showed “an airconditioning compressor with a hose reel. Under the hose reel there was a rock”.

Asked if “that was the location the USBs were buried in”, Mr Roberts-Smith said “incorrect”.

A further photo taken at 2.32pm on the same day showed the rock removed and a hole which he alleged Mr Roberts-Smith had left after he “dug up the USBs and removed the container”.

The ex-soldier denied removing the container, and said he had never buried it, always storing it in a desk drawer of the home.

Asked if the USBs contained hundreds of photos of soldiers drinking from the prosthetic leg of a man Mr Roberts-Smith had killed in Afghanistan, he agreed, saying “thousands” of such images had been taken.

Asked by Mr Owens if he had deliberately “physically hid” the USBs in the back yard to conceal evidence, Mr Roberts-Smith said that wasn’t true.

Mr Roberts-Smith told the court that he and Emma Roberts-Smith had finally parted ways in about the third week of January, 2020.

“I was going through a very difficult divorce, I wasn’t focused on USBs.

“(I was) trying to work out where I was going to live, what I was going to do.”

He agreed he had been dining with one of his lawyers, Monica Allen, in late 2019 when he had dinner with a former SAS comrade at a Woolloomooloo restaurant on December 4, 2019.

Ms Allen was photographed holding hands with Mr Roberts-Smith in Brisbane in August last year, but at the beginning of the defamation trial denied she was in a relationship with him.

Mr Roberts-Smith also denied threatening an SAS member, Person 14, who Mr Owens claimed had told the VC winner that “he would not lie on the stand” to the IGADF inquiry about the prosthetic leg incident.

Asked by Mr Owens if Mr Roberts-Smith had said “it’s going to be like that is it” and “leant forward” and said “be careful who you f*cking talk to”.

Mr Roberts-Smith said the suggested exchange was “a complete lie”.

Mr Roberts-Smith said “was shocked” at Person 14, who he thought “was recording” the conversation with him “because the whole thing was a stitch up”.

Mr Roberts-Smith did agree that on the USB sticks he received was an image of a penis with wings attached to it and the words, “Welcome to Tizak”.

The image, which he suspected had been drawn by an SAS friend, is an apparent parody of the SAS crest which is a winged sword, or a sword flanked by flames, with the motto “Who Dares Wins”.

The Battle of Tizak, in 2010, resulted in Mr Roberts-Smith being awarded his Victoria Cross.

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Mr Roberts-Smith is suing Nine newspapers and three journalists for articles published in three newspapers from the second half of 2018.

He says the reports falsely claim he committed six war crime murders in five missions in Afghanistan, that he bullied other soldiers and that he assaulted a women with whom he was having an affair.

Under cross-examination on Wednesday, the war hero was quizzed about intimidating letters Nine newspapers alleges he sent to an SAS soldier with “mafia-style threats”.

Nicholas Owens SC, for Nine, told the court Emma Roberts-Smith had lambasted her then-husband following media reports of his allegedly sending the threatening letters.

The court heard Ms Roberts-Smith said to her husband: “What the f*cK are you doing. What is this all about”.

Mr Owens then alleged Mr Roberts-Smith admitted he had sent a letter to a soldier, known as Person 18, to which his wife replied, “No more f*cking lies Ben.

“You know they can trace your fingerprints and where this letter was sent.”

Mr Roberts-Smith denied sending the threatening letters and refuted Mr Owens’ assertion that after the conversation he burnt remaining envelopes “in your firepit at home”.

Mr Roberts-Smith did admit burning computer hard drives by pouring petrol on them.

He denied doing so to conceal evidence from the official Inspector General of the Australian Defence Force (IGADF) inquiry into the conduct of Australian troops in Afghanistan.

“If I’m not going to trade in a computer, I’m going to destroy the hard drive,” he said.

“I’ve burned laptops in 2010 and 2012. It’s not anything to do with anything.”

Around 60 witnesses will testify at the 12-week trial, including 21 SAS soldiers, Emma Roberts-Smith and deputy defence minister and SAS veteran, Andrew Hastie who will give evidence against Mr Roberts-Smith.

Former Australian War Memorial director, Dr Brendan Nelson and 14 SAS soldiers will give evidence in support of him.

Last week, the war hero was questioned about an incident in which it was alleged by Nine newspapers that he had kicked a man known as Ali Jan off a cliff in 2012 and killed him.

It is Nine’s allegation, which Mr Roberts-Smith rejects, that he murdered the unarmed villager, after interrogating him, and then colluded with fellow soldiers to cover-up an unlawful killing. Mr Owens claimed the blood stains on the man’s arms suggested he had been cuffed, and claimed wounds to his mouth showed physical trauma.

Mr Owens said a strip of skin on the man’s wrists showed he had been restrained with flexi-cuffs before being shot.

“He was wearing flexi-cuffs when he was shot wasn’t he,” Mr Owens asked Mr Roberts-Smith, who replied “no, he was not”.

“You interrogated three men you had found for more than an hour, assaulted those men, eventually killed one of those men?” Mr Owens put to Mr Roberts-Smith, who said, “no, absolutely not”.

Mr Roberts-Smith told the court the man was killed while hiding in a cornfield and was a “spotter” relaying intelligence to the Taliban about the location of Australian soldiers.

In the trial’s first week, Mr Roberts-Smith broke down several times, once while recalling the 2010 Battle of Tizak, for which he awarded the medal for valour, the Victoria Cross.

On the second occasion he broke down, it was recalling discovering that one of the soldiers he had killed in the same battle – of 76 insurgents shot dead during 14 hours of fighting – was a 15-year-old boy.

Asked by Mr McClintock, how he dealt with that fact, Mr Roberts-Smith said “I struggle”.

He was also asked about Mr Owens’ opening statement in week one in which the lawyer called the ex-soldier “a mass murderer”.

Mr Roberts-Smith said he was both sad and “very angry” at accusations of he had executed unarmed Taliban fighters, or men who had been “PUCed”, and were persons under control.

“I spent my life fighting for my country. I did everything I possibly could to ensure I did it with honour,” he said.

“I listened to that … and it breaks my heart actually.”

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Ben Roberts-Smith revealed last week that he had secretly tailed his mistress as she faked having a pregnancy termination because he believed she was lying about being pregnant to keep him in their affair.

The war hero said that in February 2018, some months after the woman – known as Person 17 – had threatened to self harm, she had met up with him to attend a pregnancy termination “appointment”.

The appointment was at Brisbane’s Greenslopes Hospital and he had her surveilled on video by private eye John McLeod, because he believed she wasn’t really having an abortion.

Person 17 later told him that was true, but the pair continued their relationship until March, when they attended a function at Parliament House in Canberra hosted by then prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull.

The court heard the woman had taken a Valium pill and drunk a bottle of wine and after the event had fallen down stairs and injured her left eye.

Mr Roberts-Smith told the court he had cared for the woman who had been “incoherent” and “passed out” in the Hotel Realm.

She later accused him of assaulting her by punching her in the left eye, which Mr Roberts-Smith vehemently denies.

He said the claim of domestic violence assault, which was published in a Nine Newpapers article, had seriously damaged him and his family.

“Now I walk down the street, people will look at me and think I hit a woman,” he said.

“I couldn’t protect my kids which is extremely hard to take.

“I was worried about my children physically and emotionally, what someone might say to them, what someone might do to them,” he told the Federal Court.

He said that when the article was published identifying him as having allegedly beaten Person 17, “I started to think my life is over.”

Mr Roberts-Smith said that after media had pursued him in late 2017 and early 2018, he became aware he was the subject of “a whispering campaign”.

He was aware former SAS soldiers had made allegations about what had happened in Afghanistan.

“The bottom line is I felt I was being attacked publicly in the press and had no way of defending myself,” he said.

“I wanted to understand how … we’re not allowed to speak to the media. I’m bound by the Secrets Act.”

Mr Roberts-Smith agreed he had asked Mr McLeod to get the home addresses of former unit members, but said he hadn’t used them to intimidate his former comrades.

Asked by Mr McClintock if he had ever sent former unit members threatening letters or caused others to, Mr Roberts-Smith said no he hadn’t.

In the trial’s first week, Mr Roberts-Smith broke down several times, once while recalling the 2010 Battle of Tizak, for which he was awarded the medal for valour, the Victoria Cross.

On the second occasion he recalled discovering that one of the soldiers he had killed – of 76 insurgents shot dead during 14 hours of fighting – was a 15-year-old boy.

Asked by Mr McClintock how he dealt with that fact, Mr Roberts-Smith said “I struggle”.

Also asked about Mr Owens’ opening statement last week in which he called the ex-soldier “a mass murderer”, Mr Roberts-Smith said he was both sad and “very angry” at accusations of executing unarmed Taliban fighters.

https://www.news.com.au/national/courts-law/ben-robertssmith-takes-a-swipe-at-his-exwife/news-story/8983b3ff69c95009217ff35c4c24b6e7

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Ben-Roberts Smith punched woman in face in Canberra hotel room, court told

‘The whole story is a fabrication,’ soldier says after court hears he also took pictures of the unconscious woman naked

Ben Doherty - 25 Jun 2021

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Ben Roberts-Smith has been accused in court of punching a woman in the face in a Canberra hotel room, taking pictures of her naked body while she was unconscious and then initiating sex with her.

The soldier has vehemently denied the allegations, saying they are “completely false”.

“The whole story is a fabrication,” he told the court.

The details of Roberts-Smith’s tempestuous relationship with a woman, known in court documents as “Person 17” , were put before the federal court as part of the Victoria Cross recipient’s defamation against three newspapers he says have defamed him by portraying him as a war criminal and an abuser of women.

The court heard at one point in their relationship, after an altercation, he sent her a message by phone: “Don’t fucking abuse me again, because it won’t end well.”

Roberts-Smith did not deny sending the message but said “it wasn’t a threat”, and that he did not know the context in which it was sent.

The court has previously heard Roberts-Smith hired a private investigator to secretly surveil and film Person 17 as she attended a Brisbane abortion clinic to terminate a pregnancy the pair had agreed to end.

Roberts-Smith said he did so because he didn’t believe the woman was pregnant and that she was trying to manipulate him.

Roberts-Smith and Person 17 had a subsequent discussion at a hotel, in which he showed her the secret surveillance video of her at the abortion clinic, and she said she had been pregnant but had earlier had a miscarriage.

Owens put it to Roberts-Smith he said to Person 17: “I will burn your house down if you turn on me and it might not be you that gets hurt but people that you love”. Roberts-Smith denied saying those words.

Roberts-Smith has been accused of assaulting Person 17 in a Canberra hotel room after a dinner at the great hall of Parliament House on 28 March 2018.

The woman fell downstairs as she was leaving Parliament House with Roberts-Smith.

He has told the court she injured her head – resulting in a black eye – from this fall.

The newspapers allege the injury resulted from him punching her later on in the hotel.

Nicholas Owens, SC, for the newspapers, said that following the woman’s fall, Roberts-Smith helped her into the back seat of a commonwealth car that would drive them to the Realm hotel.

Owens put it to Roberts-Smith the woman had asked to be taken to hospital, and the driver offered – twice – to take them, but he refused, saying he could look after her.

In the hotel room, the court was told, Roberts-Smith shook Person 17 by the shoulders and said: “Fuck … what have you done? You were all over men at dinner. I should have just left you there because now everyone’s going to know we’re having an affair.”

Owens said Person 17 moved towards the bed holding Roberts-Smith’s hands and said that her head hurt.

Roberts-Smith replied either “It’s going to hurt more” or “I’ll show you what hurt is”, withdrew his right hand from hers and punched her in the left temple with his right hand.

Person 17 staggered backwards and fell onto the bed, Owens said.

“That is a complete fabrication,” Roberts-Smith said.

“I’ve never hit a woman. I never would hit a woman. And I certainly never hit Person 17.”

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While Person 17 was unconscious, Roberts-Smith went through her handbag, taking photographs of medication and of several pages of handwritten notes in her diary. The detail of those notes was not revealed before the court, but Roberts-Smith has said he was justified in taking pictures of the notes because they “pertained to me specifically”.

Roberts-Smith has previously told the court he took pictures of Person 17 while she was asleep, with the covers pulled over her body.

Owens put it to Roberts-Smith he also took pictures of her naked body with the covers pulled down.

“No, and that’s disgusting,” Roberts-Smith said.

“You did it and you showed her the photographs the next morning,” Owens put to the soldier, alleging they were taken to manipulate and control her.

“No, I did not.”

Owens said Person 17 woke up during the night, said her head hurt and that she wanted to go to hospital.

“No, she didn’t wake up,” Roberts-Smith said.

Owens put it to Roberts-Smith “you initiated sex with Person 17”, and that after they had had sex, “she told you multiple times she was sorry and that she loved you”.

Roberts-Smith is alleged to have replied he loved her too and that “it will all be OK”.

Roberts-Smith said that version of events was a “complete fabrication”.

“We didn’t speak and we certainly didn’t have sex,” he told the court.

Roberts-Smith told the court he was “annoyed and frustrated” with Person 17 on the night of the dinner because he believed she had behaved disrespectfully, but that he was not angry, and that he never assaulted her.

In his evidence-in-chief, Roberts-Smith told the court that as he was arranging for a Comcar to take them back to the hotel, a staff member told him Person 17 had fallen down the stairs.

He said Person 17 had a “significant bump at the top of her left eye”.

“She looked extremely intoxicated,” he told the court. “She wasn’t really coherent, she couldn’t string words together.”

Roberts-Smith said he did not believe Person 17 needed to go to hospital, and he took her to the hotel room where he undressed her, put an icepack on her head, and put her to bed. He said he checked her respiratory rate and pulse and stayed awake all night checking she was OK.

The court also heard detailed evidence about Roberts-Smith’s marriage to Emma Roberts and his version of “separation” from his wife when he was still regularly staying at the marital home and having sex with his wife.

Roberts-Smith had been having an extramarital affair with Person 17 for four months before he told his wife about it. But he said he and his wife were separated at the time he and Person 17 began seeing each other.

“I’ve never had any qualms with using the word affair,” he told the court.

“It was life, I didn’t get it right all the time, but that’s exactly what happened.”

Roberts-Smith did not reveal the affair to a marriage counsellor or a psychiatrist.

Owens put it to Roberts-Smith that he pressured his wife to “adhere to the lie” of being separated so as to protect the soldier’s public reputation. Owens put it to Roberts-Smith that he told his wife if she did not accede “she would lose the children”.

“That is completely false,” Roberts-Smith said.

The court heard Roberts was “furious” when he called her to tell her she needed to conduct an interview with the Australian newspaper in which she would agree she was separated from Roberts-Smith at the time of his relationship with Person 17, and that she needed to participate in a photo-shoot.

Emma Roberts is scheduled to give evidence later in this trial.

Roberts-Smith is suing the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Canberra Times for defamation over a series of reports published in 2018 that he alleges are defamatory because they portray him as someone who “broke the moral and legal rules of military engagement” and committed war crimes including murder. The 42-year-old has consistently denied the allegations, saying they are “false”, “baseless” and “completely without any foundation in truth”. The newspapers are defending their reporting as true.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/jun/25/ben-roberts-smith-punched-woman-in-face-in-canberra-hotel-room-court-told

>>13855472

Afghan translators who helped military flown to Australia on protection visas

Stephen Dziedzic - 25 June 2021

Dozens of Afghans granted safe haven after working alongside Australian soldiers and diplomats in Afghanistan have arrived in Australia.

The ABC has confirmed that around 60 people – including Afghan interpreters and locally engaged staff in Kabul – have landed in Australia on recent commercial flights.

The news was first reported by SBS.

The ABC has been told the roughly 60 Afghans are part of a contingent of well over 200 people who will arrive in coming days.

Australia has been resettling Afghans who fear for their lives because they worked for the federal government since 2013.

Over 1,400 visas have been granted to them and their family members over that period.

But the government has intensified efforts to resettle people ahead of the US military withdrawal, which has provoked intense anxiety among Afghans who have worked for Western countries.

Violence has intensified in Afghanistan this year and some analysts predict the country could quickly fall to the Taliban after US soldiers leave.

Earlier this month an Afghan translator employed by Australian troops told the ABC they had been placed on a Taliban kill list for working with "infidel enemies".

He also said a Taliban operative had tracked him to his home – years after they had tried to kill him by running him over with a car.

The Department of Home Affairs said it was "urgently" processing visas for the Australian government's locally employed staff members and was "working with other Government agencies and providers to facilitate … the movement of these visa holders to Australia".

The department also confirmed the Afghans and their family members are exempt from Australia's travel restrictions – although it stressed they still have to meet "rigorous health, character and national security requirements".

Earlier this month the Prime Minister said he was "very aware" of the danger faced by some Afghan interpreters, and said the government was working "urgently and steadfastly and patiently" to resettle people in Australia.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-25/afghan-translators-who-helped-military-flown-to-australia-/100245356

Japan will stand by Australia on complex issues in Asia Pacific: Japanese Ambassador Shingo Yamagami

Sarah Basford Canales - JUNE 24 2021

The Japanese Ambassador to Australia has told business and government leaders Japan will be a "real friend" to Australia amid rising tensions within the region.

When asked about Japan's approach to navigating complex regional issues, including growing friction with China, Ambassador Shingo Yamagami told a Canberra business forum on Thursday like-minded countries needed to find common ground.

Mr Yamagami said it was important to follow the rule of law in difficult times and not resort to unilateral, arbitrary measures when disputes arise.

But if relations were to deteriorate further, Japan would be a "real friend" to Australia, he said.

"We have to be careful not to escalate the tensions on our part, but when push comes to shove, you will know who's your real friend," Mr Yamagami said.

"This is the kind of moment Australia needs real friends and Japan is hereby standing with Australia."

Indian High Commissioner Manpreet Vohra echoed Mr Yamagami's words, advocating for a banding of countries in the region that share common ideals.

He said the border aggression India faced from its neighbours in recent years had been a catalyst for the move.

"I think that is the attempt at the moment … for some of us countries then to get together and try and offer a different approach, which guarantees that amount of sovereignty, that amount of rules-based order and approach to how things should be done in our region," Mr Vohra said.

"That, I think, is the glue that is coming together between some of our countries and Australia."

But the Japanese Ambassador was clear not to fuel ideas that two world teams were forming following years of trade and political hostility between China and the United States.

Instead, Australia, Japan and key powers in the Asia-Pacific region, including India and Indonesia, could work towards guaranteeing order in their backyards.

"We are not living in a time of Cold War, or any binary, no competition between two superpowers or two big powers," Mr Yamagami said.

"I think what is facing all of us now, including in Australia, India, in Japan, Indonesia, and many others in this region, is how to make sure this growth based on our regional and international order could be maintained and further strengthened.

"No one country, you know, dictates what to do. No one country puts pressure on others by way of coercion or intimidation … that is the kind of regional order we would like to see in the Pacific.

"Every man is equal in front of the law. It's the same applying to sovereign nations."

https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/7312424/japan-a-real-friend-to-australia-amid-tensions/?cs=14329

>>13979916

Committee for Economic Development of Australia Tweet

"When push comes to shove, you will know who is your real friend, and this is the kind of moment Australia needs real friends - and Japan is hereby standing with Australia." - Japan's Ambassador to Australia, @YamagamiShingo, on tensions with China. #SoN2021

https://twitter.com/ceda_news/status/1407937914978275339

>>13855451

Marine Rotational Force – Darwin Facebook Post

25 June 2021

Ready…Exercise

From June 11-24, U.S. Marines with Marine Rotational Force – Darwin, participated in Exercise Southern Jackaroo at Mount Bundey Training Area, NT, Australia. The Marines teamed up with the Australian Army and Japan Ground Self-Defense Force to demonstrate their combined ability to provide mounted and dismounted support to trilateral maneuver elements utilizing direct and indirect fire support weapons. Defense ties between the United States, allies, and partner nations are critical to regional security, cooperation, and integration of our combined capabilities.

(U.S. Marine Corps photos by Sgt. Micha Pierce and Cpl. Sarah E. Taggett)

https://www.facebook.com/MRFDarwin/posts/160431436119348

>>13895726

Greg Hunt orders review into risky Wuhan research

SHARRI MARKSON and LIAM MENDES - JUNE 24, 2021

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The CSIRO and several Australian universities have engaged in at least 10 joint projects with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the past decade, a laboratory US intelligence has linked to the Chinese military and which is suspected of being at the centre of the Covid-19 outbreak.

Australian scientists and politicians are calling on Health Minister Greg Hunt to halt and review “gain-of-function” research in Australia, amid concerns this type of experimentation may have sparked the pandemic.

The risky research, which aims to increase the virulence of viruses through genetic manipulation, is allowed to take place under Australian government policy, even though it was deemed so dangerous the Obama administration banned it in 2014.

Late on Thursday — after questions from The Australian — a spokesperson for Mr Hunt said he had ordered a review of gain-of-function research in Australia by the National Health and Medical Research Council.

The CSIRO has been forced to correct evidence it gave at a Senate estimates hearing after initially denying its researchers had undertaken work on live bats with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab at the centre of growing international concern it was the source of Covid-19. CSIRO chief operating officer Judi Zielke admitted the organisation had “undertaken research on bats previously”.

Under questioning from ­Nationals senator Matt Canavan on June 3, the CSIRO initially gave evidence that it “does not undertake research on live bats at ACDP”. However, Senator Canavan later presented the CSIRO with an excerpt from a scientific paper written in conjunction with the Wuhan lab stating: “Wild caught P Alecto bats were trapped in Southern Queensland, Australia, and transported alive by air to the Australian Animal Health Laboratory in Victoria, where they were euthanised for dissection.”

Correcting the record in a letter the next day, Ms Zielke said her ­responses “weren’t clear and have led to misinterpretation of the answers”. She clarified that research on live bats was not currently being undertaken but had been.

Senator Canavan said the Morrison government should immediately suspend any gain-of-function research or experiments involving potential pandemic pathogens. “Serious questions have been raised that gain-of-function may be the reason we have a global pandemic so it would be absolutely irresponsible to ­continue such funding when there is a risk of it causing another pandemic,” Senator Canavan said.

“I don’t think there’s a case to fund gain-of-function research long term but, if there is, the ­burden of proof should be on those virologists who think it makes sense and they should be held to account for how they are protecting the wider com­munity for this type of research.”

Raina MacIntyre, head of the Kirby Institute’s biosecurity program, said she has been concerned about the risks of gain-of-function research since 2011, from both an ethical standpoint and because of the risk of accidents.

“It’s the kind of research that has global impact because you can do a bit of research here in Australia, say there’s an accident, and it spreads the virus, it can infect people in Indonesia, or in India or somewhere else where the research wasn’t conducted, so that opens up a whole lot of other ethical questions,” Professor MacIntyre said. “The possibility (that gain-of function research causing the Covid-19 pandemic) has to be considered because if we don’t consider the possibility, then we can’t take any action to prevent any future incidents that might occur. And we know that there are a lot of laboratory accidents that have been documented.”

Australian government policy has continued to allow gain-of-function research.

A spokeswoman from the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator said: “Work with genetically modified pathogenic viruses would be restricted to a high-level containment facility certified by the regulator and would require a licence from the regulator before it can proceed. Australia’s gene technology legislation is regularly reviewed to keep the legislation up to date with technological progress and changes in scientific understanding of the risks posed by gene technology.”

(continued)

>>13984301

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The CSIRO’s Australian Animal Health Laboratory, in East Geelong, is one facility accredited to undertake research on pathogenic viruses.

The CSIRO trained Chinese infectious diseases expert Shi Zhengli’s protege, Peng Zhou, who is now head of the Bat Virus Infection and Immunity Project at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Associate Professor Zhou spent three years at the Australian Animal Health Laboratory from 2011 to 2014. He was sent by China to complete his doctorate at the CSIRO in 2009-10.

Professor Shi, director of the Centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, also worked in Australia from February to May 2006.

Australian universities have engaged in at least 10 collaborative projects in the past decade with the Wuhan lab. The most recent CSIRO project with the Wuhan Institute of Virology was in 2016. It involved providing the first gene map of the Type 1 interferon region of a bat species and was done by the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Monash University, the CSIRO and the University of Melbourne.

The CSIRO and Wuhan Institute of Virology also collaborated in 2014 to examine the bat immune system. Professor Shi, Professor Zhou and Lijun Wu participated from Wuhan, while the CSIRO’s scientists were Michelle Baker, Diane Green, Paul Monaghan and Chris Cowled.

The CSIRO and the Wuhan Institute of Virology collaborated on several projects on bats’ antiviral immunity in 2011. The purpose of a study was to understand why bats remained asymptomatic to viral infection that was capable of spillover to other susceptible mammals “with lethal consequences”.

The studies were jointly funded by the Australian, Chinese and US governments.

The University of Queensland was involved in a study with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in August last year – despite the fact intelligence agencies had said four months earlier that Covid-19 might have leaked from the Wuhan laboratory. The August 2020 paper – titled “Origin and cross-species transmission of bat coronaviruses in China” – lists the University of Queensland School of Veterinary Science’s Hume Field as co-author alongside Professor Shi, Peter Daszak and 12 other scientists.

Dr Hume is also an EcoHealth Alliance science and policy adviser.

The concern about gain-of-function research causing a pandemic or being used for bioterrorism led to its ban under the Obama administration in 2014. National Institutes of Health director Anthony Fauci lifted the ban during the Trump administration.

Professor MacIntyre said there needed to be more community consultation on this research.

“The impact of gain of function research, whether it’s development of cures or vaccines, or whether it’s the creation of a pandemic, ­accidentally, the impact is on the community,” she said. “The community is an essential stakeholder and I feel that the community hasn’t been involved adequately in the whole debate.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/csiro-unis-in-10-joint-research-projects-with-wuhan-lab/news-story/5856c25b8a9036535eef9e9057f5d127

>>13943323

Assange's fiancée urges Biden to free WikiLeaks founder to show U.S. has changed

Kate Holton - June 26, 2021

LONDON, June 25 (Reuters) - President Joe Biden must let Julian Assange go free if he wants the United States to become a beacon for a free press once again and put the legacy of Donald Trump behind it, the fiancée of the WikiLeaks founder told Reuters.

Washington has sought the extradition of Assange over his role in one of the biggest ever leaks of classified information, accusing him of putting lives in danger by releasing vast troves of confidential U.S. military records and diplomatic cables.

He has now spent nine years in jail or self-incarceration in Britain, and both Assange's fiancée Stella Moris and the British judge overseeing the extradition request have warned he may not survive a process to send him across the Atlantic.

"If Biden really wants to break with the Trump legacy, then he has to drop the case," Moris told Reuters in an interview. "They can't maintain this prosecution against Julian while saying that they defend a global press freedom."

When Barack Obama served as president and Biden was his vice president, the U.S. decided not to seek Assange’s extradition on the grounds that what WikiLeaks did was similar to journalistic activities protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution.

Weeks after taking office Trump administration officials stepped up public criticism of Assange and later filed a series of criminal charges accusing him of participating in a hacking conspiracy.

The U.S. Justice Department said in February it planned to continue to seek the extradition for Assange to face hacking conspiracy charges. read more

Moris said the couple were planning to marry soon at the top-security Belmarsh prison where he is being held.

U.S. prosecutors and Western security officials regard Assange as a reckless enemy of the state whose actions threatened the lives of agents named in the leaked material.

Supporters pit him as an anti-establishment hero who exposed U.S. wrongdoing in Afghanistan and Iraq and say his prosecution is a politically-motivated assault on journalism that gives a free pass to oppressive regimes around the world.

WikiLeaks came to prominence when it published a U.S. military video in 2010 showing a 2007 attack by Apache helicopters in Baghdad that killed a dozen people, including two Reuters news staff.

An effort to extradite him was launched in 2019 after he was detained in London after taking refuge in Ecuador's embassy in the British capital for seven years to avoid being extradited to Sweden.

British judge Vanessa Baraitser said in January that although she accepted the U.S. legal arguments in the case, she said Assange's mental health issues meant he would be at risk of suicide if extradited, leading to her rejecting the request.

Moris, who has two young boys with the Australian-born Assange, said the 49-year-old was very low but still fighting. She likened his treatment as akin to the way some journalists are treated in China and Saudi Arabia.

"I think there's no doubt that Julian wouldn't survive an extradition," she said.

She argued that any robust democracy had to accommodate internal dissent. "A superpower that has a free press is very different in nature from one that does not."

She said she is hopeful that the case will be viewed differently under a Biden administration, but refused to say if his legal team had held talks with U.S. officials.

Despite that hope, she said the couple were planning to marry soon inside Belmarsh, once the paperwork is done, rather than wait to hear his fate.

She said Assange had been given a huge lift recently when she was allowed to take their two sons to visit, allowing him to touch his children for the first time in over a year.

"He was happy to see us, but he's struggling," she said. "He's very low but he's fighting. He has the hope that this will end soon."

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/assanges-fiance-urges-biden-free-wikileaks-founder-show-us-has-changed-2021-06-25/

>>13848125

There are two versions of the facts at Ben Roberts-Smith's defamation trial. Neither is kind to the SAS

Nick Grimm - 26 June 2021

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Ben Roberts-Smith is a hard bloke to miss.

I almost barrelled into the two-metre-plus former soldier on Sydney's Macquarie Street as I rushed to buy a coffee.

We danced that familiar shuffle performed by thousands of city-street pedestrians every day as our brains calculated the best odds of shifting either left or right to avoid collision. Australia's most decorated soldier smiled and with a polite "excuse me", we each continued on our solitary way.

Me to that coffee shop. Him to Courtroom 18D of the Australian Federal Court in Sydney to face another day in the witness box at his headline-grabbing defamation proceedings where at one point he was asked how he felt people viewed him.

"I walk down the street and people will look at me," he told the court through tears.

"The first thing I think of is that they think I hit a woman."

But the allegation he punched his lover in the face after a day of heavy drinking isn't his only source of torment. Killing teenaged insurgents is another.

"I saw things in Afghanistan and I did things in Afghanistan like having to engage adolescents that I'm not proud of and I live with that … I accept that and that is a trauma I've lived with."

Mr Roberts-Smith has brought the defamation proceedings in a bid to clear his name of the slew of allegations in newspaper articles that he says labelled him as a war criminal, a bully and a domestic violence offender.

The man heaped with honour and distinctions for his war service insists he was immediately identifiable as the soldier dubbed "Leonidas" in the stories, thanks to his family connections in the military, distinctive tattoos and his towering height.

"I've had to watch my family's good name dragged through the mud for three years," he told the court.

But the case is also seeing the good name of Australia's military get dragged through the muck.

Both legal teams have presented unflattering pictures of SAS

Legal counsel acting for the defendants, Nine Entertainment, Nicholas Owens has told the court it will be presented with two diametrically opposed versions of events that unfolded during Australia's involvement in the war in Afghanistan.

But regardless of which side succeeds in this case, both legal teams have presented distinctly unflattering pictures of the Australian Army's elite SAS regiment, certain to tarnish the image of a professional, highly disciplined and drilled fighting force.

Nine will argue that war criminals served within its ranks, men who murdered or were complicit in the murder of unarmed prisoners. And while Mr Roberts-Smith vehemently denies being a war criminal or a witness to war crimes, he himself describes a military force wracked by "corrosive jealousy" and infighting, bitter resentments and often prone to displays of outright incompetence on the battlefield.

It stands in stark contrast to the SAS's long-held image as the best of the best.

In his 2006 book The Partnership: The Inside Story of US-Australian Alliance Under Howard and Bush, Greg Sheridan gave this description of the regiment:

"The SAS is the cream of the Australian military … as good as any special forces formation in the world."

The author goes on to quote former US deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage.

"The Australian SAS are shit-hot, and our people love to work with them," he said.

(continued)

>>13984690

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The standards of the SAS

The mystique surrounding the SAS is in no small part due to its notoriously tough selection process. The Australian Defence Department described the kind of candidates it was looking for in a 2006 call for recruits in the Army News.

"Mentally tough, quick thinking, innovative and can keep a cool head in difficult situations," it said.

In 2010, the same journal provided a glimpse of the gruelling selection regimen SAS recruits would undergo.

"We want to break them all down physically and mentally, so they are at the same level, and then we see the essence of the man, that's how we pick the ones we want," one SAS instructor told Army News.

A recruiting sergeant described how important the standards were.

"We want to maintain our standards, so they never drop. We know the sort of people we want to fight with and the people that will cover our backs," he said.

What the court has heard

At Mr Roberts-Smith's defamation proceedings we've heard accounts of soldiers who had survived the SAS's notoriously gruelling selection and training process and yet, in his view, didn't deserve to be serving within its ranks.

"The SAS does not have an infallible selection process … there are people who shouldn't be in the unit," he told the court.

He went on to describe soldiers (who were supposedly among the nation's most elite) going into battle without first checking to ensure their weapons were functional or that they had brought the essential supplies they needed to keep them working (machines guns that needed copious amounts of oil to stop from jamming) or who opened fire on civilians and their own fellow soldiers.

He described fighters who sometimes woke from night terrors pointing their machine guns at their terrified colleagues, yelling, "I'm a friendly, I'm a friendly".

Another, according to Mr Roberts-Smith, endangered his life and his mission trying to shoot a stray dog and crashing his military vehicle in the process.

That led to a fresh allegation from Nine barrister Nicholas Owens that he himself killed the animal.

"You pulled out a gun and shot the dog, didn't you?"

"No I didn't," responded Mr Roberts-Smith.

And then there was the prosthetic leg souvenired from the body of a dead insurgent and turned into a drinking vessel back at base so that troops could "decompress" after going into battle and as Mr Roberts-Smith put it, exorcise "the demons that people deal with".

On another occasion, the court heard about a soldier identified in court as Person One, who risked his own life and that of his comrades during a Taliban mortar attack because he was more concerned about the noodles he was cooking.

"When you have ordnance in the air, you don't really want to stuff around worrying about whether your lunch is ready," Mr Roberts-Smith said.

But Nine's barrister Mr Owens suggested the veteran was using a trivial incident to try to discredit the other soldier, leading to the following exchange:

"You've had years to think about every possible act of incompetence … and that makes the top four? The incident never happened as you described it?" Mr Owens said.

"No, it did […] Person One just wasn't a very good soldier," Mr Roberts-Smith replied.

(continued)

>>13984699

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Former SAS members to give evidence

Nine's lawyers have argued Mr Roberts-Smith's alleged murder of unarmed Afghan prisoners took place in circumstances that had nothing to do with the "heat of battle" or the "fog of war", foreshadowing that 21 current and former SAS members will give evidence against Mr Roberts-Smith.

That includes Australia's Assistant Defence Minister, senator Andrew Hastie, a former SAS captain who last year told the ABC he encountered a toxic "warrior culture" when he was deployed to Afghanistan.

"There were two warrior cultures — there was a bad one, which was built on self-adulation, ego, and the worship of war itself, and there was a better warrior culture, which was about quiet professionalism, service before self and protecting our country," he said.

Giving evidence in support of Mr Roberts-Smith will be around a dozen of his former SAS comrades, and character witnesses including former Australian War Memorial director Brendan Nelson who in 2018 launched the exhibition From The Shadows, focusing on Australia's special forces.

"We can't apply the prism of our comfortable sanctimony to judgments about what they have to do in the operations we send them to conduct," Dr Nelson told reporters at the time.

But the two sharply contrasting cases presented in the Federal Court have painted a picture of a fighting force unravelling under the pressure of repeated tours inside a war zone where their strategic goals (the defeat of the Taliban) ultimately stood little chance of success.

As the case has been unfolding in the Federal Court in Sydney, news has been emerging from Afghanistan of the Taliban retaking districts in Uruzgan Province where Australian troops were stationed during the conflict.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-26/ben-roberts-smith-defamation-trial-sas/100245286

>>13848229

‘Don’t be disrespectful. He’ll be upset if you don’t sleep with him’

For almost three decades, missionary Richard Daschbach ran an orphanage providing refuge for some of East Timor’s most needy children. He has since admitted to sexually abusing countless young girls – yet locals still support him.

Chris Ray - JUNE 26, 2021

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Nona was born in a dirt-floor hut in a East Timor highland village, where hungry children grow up stunted and wise men see omens in the flight of birds. Her parents grew rice and corn in swidden gardens, but struggled to feed six children. At the age of 9, Nona decided on a solution: she would leave home to live at an orphanage called Topu Honis. It had brightly painted dormitories, neat vegetable gardens and a tiny church. “There was a playground with a slide and swings and the girls wore colourful, clean outfits. It seemed like a dream for a little girl,” she remembers.

Topu Honis sits in a mountain valley in Oecusse, a coastal district cut off from the rest of East Timor by Indonesian territory. In this distant backwater, religion, poverty and politics have sensationally collided in a child abuse scandal that has put the Vatican at odds with its most devout province and muddied the reputation of East Timor’s paramount political figure, Xanana Gusmão. The result is a criminal trial that raises the question: can the powerless get justice in Asia’s youngest nation?

In Meto, the regional language of Oecusse’s Atoni ethnic group, Topu Honis means to lead someone to a better life. An American Catholic missionary, Richard Daschbach, set up the orphanage in 1991 when East Timor was under Indonesian occupation. More than an orphanage – Daschbach called it a “safe house” – Topu Honis also took in non-orphans from the poorest families, widows and women fleeing domestic violence. It attracted sponsors from Australia and the US and grew to accommodate about 100 girls and boys of primary-school age.

Topu Honis’s neighbouring village, Kutet, was the site of Nona’s school – a 90-minute uphill slog from her family house built of thatch and cocowood. Out of school, she gathered firewood beneath grey and white eucalypts, fetched water from a spring and scared birds from fields of ripening rice. Now, at the age of 25, her hands flash polished nails as she gestures during a video call from her new home far from Oecusse.

Nona’s best friend, the daughter of a widowed neighbour, lived at Topu Honis, but sometimes turned up at home unexpectedly. “She’d say, ‘I’m not going back unless some other kid comes with me.’ She never said why she was uncomfortable there, and no one asked,” says Nona, who has a round, cheerful face and deep-brown hair set in a loose bun. “I volunteered to join her because I wanted to help my family and me. I knew I would get to eat every day and I wouldn’t have to walk far to school.”

Kutet was still swathed in morning mist when Nona went with her best friend and her mother to see Daschbach in 2005. He had grown up a steelworker’s son in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but almost everyone in Oecusse kneeled to kiss his hand. They referred to him as “Uis Neno” – literally, “Lord of the sky”, a Meto concept appropriated by early missionaries to describe the Christian God. “Everybody, old and young, revered him and feared him like nothing I’ve seen since,” Nona says. Daschbach, a slight man with a bony face and sparse, grey hair, told Nona at their first meeting, “I accept you, you’re special.”

At home, Nona slept on a mat on the ground or shared a bed with her sisters. At Topu Honis, she was thrilled to get her own bunk bed, a powder-blue frock and her first comb. Nona’s daily routine began with a bucket shower before a bell announced breakfast of rice or instant noodles, eaten on the verandah of the dormitory she shared with about 20 girls before heading to Kutet school, an easy stroll away. Afternoons at Topu Honis were set aside for play. After the 6pm dinner of rice and vegetables, everyone assembled for prayers and hymns in a building that also enclosed Daschbach’s quarters and a guest bedroom.

The American, then in his mid-60s, invariably led prayers with a girl sitting on his lap. He mostly dressed in long pants and polo shirts but, on Sundays, he put on white vestments for morning mass at the village church. On Sunday afternoons he would stand naked in the orphanage shower block and wash as many children as he had energy for. “He always did us girls first,” Nona says. “He said he did it because he didn’t want us to waste shampoo.”

(continued)

>>13985350

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Within a couple of days, Nona learnt she would be required to sleep with Daschbach and have sex with him – and that his assaults ran to a timetable. Girls were put into groups of four for cleaning duties and organised according to a roster posted on a wall. “Usually, if it was your turn to sweep that day, all of you would go to Daschbach’s room during his afternoon nap and after evening prayers,” Nona says. “Sometimes, he requested just one girl.”

In 2007, after Nona had left the orphanage, Australian musician Ros Dunlop recorded girls and boys at Topu Honis singing the anthem of Falintil, the armed wing of the resistance against Indonesian occupation, which cost as many as 200,000 Timorese lives. With hands over chests and fists clenched, the children looked straight ahead “trying to be really strong”, recalls Dunlop, a renowned clarinettist who taught at Sydney Conservatorium of Music for 26 years. It’s one of her poignant recollections of East Timor, which she visited dozens of times over 13 years, mostly to record traditional music.

Lately, she’s had to contemplate a more disturbing memory: the procession of children to and from Daschbach’s room. “There were always kids sleeping in his room, and always girls. That much I was well aware of,” says Dunlop, who stayed at Topu Honis four times between 2005 and 2016, twice with her husband and three children and twice alone. “We didn’t think much of it because there seemed to be heaps of kids going in and out. There was no attempt to conceal anything.” She thought of it in the context of families like her own, with young children “always in and out of their parents’ bedroom”.

During Dunlop’s first visit, her two daughters and a son, who were about 8, 10 and 15 at the time, played with the orphanage kids, who “seemed happy and part of a cohesive community”. She was “stunned and appalled” when Daschbach was exposed as a predator: “A lot of foreigners spent time there and it seems none of us suspected a thing. It was totally and utterly a well-kept secret.” She calls it “a betrayal of so many people on so many levels – especially his victims. Some were the same age as my youngest child at the time.”

Daschbach shared his considerable knowledge of local music and Dunlop feels her research is now “tainted by association” with the former priest. That includes her doctoral thesis and an award-winning bilingual textbook for the East Timor school syllabus.

Nona remembers Daschbach’s bedroom contained a bunk bed, wardrobe and shelves stacked with books and photo albums. A curtain divided the bedroom from his office, which doubled as a dispensary. “Usually, two girls would sleep on the top bunk and the other two with Richard on the bottom,” Nona says. “I thought, ‘What is going on here?’ I didn’t know it was wrong, but I knew it wasn’t normal, because it had never happened to me before.”

It seems intrusive and unnecessary to ask Nona how she was abused. In statements to camera posted on the Timorese news website Neon Metin, former Topu Honis girls have alleged masturbation, oral sex and vaginal penetration. Daschbach’s girl victims allegedly were as young as six; he never touched boys, it seems. According to Nona, when she tried to avoid going to his room, female staff members said, “‘Don’t be disrespectful. It’s your turn and he’ll be upset if you don’t sleep with him.’ I was frightened to refuse. We thought he had the power to end your life.”

Nona never discussed the abuse with other orphanage girls. “I thought, ‘This must be what everyone has to do to pay for being in this magical place full of opportunities,’” she says. She got away from Topu Honis after a year but asks Good Weekend not to disclose how she left, where she went to, or her real name. Her unease in the presence of men gradually faded and she wears her injustice lightly. But she’s still “traumatised and angry” about her maltreatment when “I didn’t even understand what those parts of the body are for”. (Daschbach’s lawyers in Dili did not respond to Good Weekend’s request for comment.)

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“Priest Assigned to Indonesia – Father Daschbach Ordained Recently” was the headline over a Pittsburgh Press report on March 5, 1966. Daschbach attended the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. before serving as hospital chaplain at Fort Belvoir army base in Virginia. He was then about 30, the eldest of three children, including a brother, Edwin, who followed him into the priesthood. They belonged to the Society of the Divine Word, known by its Latin initials SVD, the biggest Catholic missionary order with more than 6000 priests in 70 countries.

Daschbach spent eight years in Indonesian West Timor before crossing into neighbouring Oecusse after Indonesia annexed Portuguese East Timor in 1975. By 1999, when the East Timorese voted overwhelmingly for independence, Daschbach had earned a regional reputation for his charitable work among the Atoni. His standing grew after he shielded villagers from pro-Indonesian militiamen as they butchered and looted their way across the country in revenge for the referendum result.

Tens of thousands of Australians marched in protest against the violence, as well as the inaction by the Howard government, which was forced to commit 5000 Australian troops to lead an international intervention. Australian peacekeepers in Oecusse were sufficiently impressed with Daschbach to give him a Land Cruiser troop carrier when they left.

Australian National University anthropologist Michael Rose was a young United Nations adviser to the East Timor government when he first met Daschbach in Oecusse’s tiny seaside capital of Pante Macassar in 2011. Rose returned three years later to do PhD fieldwork and would often hike a steep forest track from the coast to Kutet, where Daschbach was happy to explain whatever ritual speech or agricultural practice Rose happened to observe. “He used to say things like, ‘Everyone is welcome at Topu Honis’ and encourage visitors,” says Rose. “In retrospect, I now think it’s likely that this show of openness was a deliberate ploy to lull outsiders into believing he had nothing to hide.”

Over time, Daschbach came to embrace the Atoni indigenous religion based on sacred landscapes and ancestral spirits. Rose recorded that the American would don a ceremonial headdress and lead village elders to make an offering of pig’s liver in order to open a door to the ancestors. To locals, he professed to interpret omens conveyed through the behaviour of birds. Rose says Catholicism has a history of adopting elements of local ritual to its own end, but “Richard Daschbach’s direct participation in divination ceremonies was unusual, if not unique. Together with his long history in the area and rare ability to speak Meto, it gave him a great deal of power.”

During the past three years, Daschbach has been dragged down to earth. In November 2018, the Vatican expelled him from the priesthood for what the SVD’s top lawyer, Rome-based procurator general Peter Dikos, called the worst case of child abuse in its 143-year history. Now, Daschbach is fighting criminal charges over the alleged sexual abuse of 14 minors (including Nona), child pornography and domestic violence.

Pante Macassar sits under a denuded mountain that tumbles to a fertile river flat along the Savu Sea. Timor television shows Daschbach arriving at the town’s whitewashed, two-storey courthouse.

The sprightly, bespectacled American, now 84, looks businesslike with pen and notebook in his shirt pocket as he steps across the portico to face three black-robed judges. Climbing into a vehicle after the court adjourns, he pulls down a blue surgical mask to smile through missing teeth and waves to dozens of tearful well-wishers, mostly women and girls, who line the road as he drives off.

Daschbach is the first priest to be charged with a sex offence in East Timor, where many believe a priest should never be doubted, let alone punished, according to Berta Antonieta, founder of Grupu Feminista, a Timorese women’s network. Priests have escaped censure even after fathering children, she says, adding, “Even for me as a Timorese, I still don’t understand the level of tolerance people have for individual priests who commit these acts.”

Why the enduring support for Daschbach in Oecusse? Without Topu Honis, its female staff face a dismal future. According to the World Bank, almost half the population of East Timor lives in poverty – and Oecusse is the poorest district of all. Musician Ros Dunlop says orphanage staff clearly enabled Daschbach’s crimes: “Topu Honis was feeding and sheltering all these people and they wanted it to stay that way.”

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Material factors are not the only explanation. Michael Rose says many in Oecusse attribute illness and ill-fortune to spiritual forces, which makes Daschbach “a very powerful and potentially frightening figure. Many people believe his prayers can both heal and kill.” Officials at the Ministry of Social Solidarity in Dili have described children still at Topu Honis as “brainwashed” and unwilling to speak to ministry representatives, according to SVD records.

Internationally, in scandal after scandal, the Catholic Church has sought to cover up child abuse and protect perpetrators. Not so the Vatican in the Daschbach case: it has struggled to extinguish Timorese church support for Daschbach for three years. East Timor is more than 97 per cent Catholic, a higher proportion than anywhere bar the Vatican, and loyalty to Daschbach is not confined to distant Oecusse.

The SVD’s Rome headquarters received the first complaint of sexual abuse on March 2, 2018 via Daschbach’s SVD superiors in Dili. That same day, it instructed the congregation’s East Timor head, Yohanes Suban Gapun, to confine Daschbach to the SVD seminary in the capital, Dili. During a March 5 phone conference, Daschbach admitted the sexual assault allegations were “100 per cent true”, according to SVD records. A month later, Rome told Gapun he risked being dismissed if he failed to follow instructions to report Daschbach to civil authorities. Next, Gapun had to be told to keep Daschbach off the internet and not allow him visitors.

In December 2019, Dikos, a 52-year-old Slovak, flew from Rome to Dili, where he told Tempo Timor newspaper the former priest had engaged in “systematic abuse of girls on a daily basis…for years and years”. The Holy See’s envoy to East Timor, Marco Sprizzi, a longtime papal diplomat, also sought to dispel persistent doubt about Daschbach’s guilt. “Richard Daschbach himself admitted and pleaded guilty before the church. It looks like he backed down before civil justice, but before the church he never backed down. I want to be clear on this,” Sprizzi told the Portuguese news agency Lusa in 2020.

The SVD has appointed a veteran missionary, Melbourne-based William Burt, to liaise with East Timor over the case. “I was in awe of this man. I thought what he was doing with the orphanage was just fantastic,” Burt says. “But the good that he did does not in any way lessen the evil that he did. You can’t quantify the harm he’s done. We don’t know how many kids were involved or how their lives were wrecked.”

Daschbach even defied the Vatican’s supreme disciplinary body, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. After it defrocked him, he took a ferry back to Oecusse and performed Mass until police returned him to house arrest. Last year, Daschbach spent six months in jail on remand, but senior clerics worked to exonerate him.

In September, the head of the East Timor church’s Justice and Peace Commission, Herminio de Fatima Goncalves, dipped his pen in vitriol to accuse a women’s group and lawyers of forming a “justice mafia” to kidnap Topu Honis orphans and fabricate evidence. His report revealed names and locations of alleged victims including some in hiding after receiving threats. After weeks of outcry, East Timor’s archbishop Vírgilio do Carmo da Silva was forced to sack Goncalves and apologise for the commission’s report.

Since then, Daschbach has gained a powerful secular champion in Xanana Gusmão, the 75-year-old former guerrilla commander revered by many Timorese as “Maun Boot” or Big Brother. Gusmão’s sonorous voice seemed to fill East Timor’s airwaves when I last visited the country a decade ago. He was in a seven-year stretch as prime minister and would harangue audiences about Australia’s unfair share of Timor Sea petroleum fields – a dispute eventually resolved to East Timor’s benefit. Gusmão has been president or prime minister for more than 12 of East Timor’s 20 years of self-government. He no longer occupies the PM’s office in the colonial-era Palácio do Governo on Dili’s waterfront, but remains highly influential.

Daschbach spent his 84th birthday on January 26 at the spacious Dili home of a senior public servant. He was supposedly under house arrest, a limitation flexible enough to allow him a visitor, Gusmão, who arrived dressed in blue jeans, T-shirt and an olive-green slouch hat over thinning silver hair. He brought along a media contingent, including a TV crew and the government news agency, Tatoli. The resulting footage was unsettling. Big Brother wrapped the defrocked priest in a long embrace, fed him cake, poured wine into his mouth and sang Happy Birthday. Flanked by religious iconography, the pair posed with an illustrated card from the children of Topu Honis. It said they “continue to love Father Daschbach”.

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The invited media failed to report Daschbach’s defrocking or the child-abuse charges, prompting the Press Council president, Virgilio Guterres, to denounce them as “messenger boys” who aimed to “whitewash” the disgraced former priest. Gusmão’s performance set off a social-media altercation among Timorese and divided his own family. His sons Alexandre, 21, Kay Olok, 18, and Daniel, 16, who live in Melbourne, sent handwritten letters to Daschbach’s accusers, praising their courage and apologising for their father’s stance.

Their Australian mother, Kirsty Sword Gusmão, whose 15-year marriage to Xanana ended in 2015, did pioneering work to combat abuse of women and girls in East Timor. She says her sons received “an avalanche of love and appreciation” after she posted the letters on Facebook with a warning that her ex-husband’s intervention had “big implications” for the “psychological wellbeing of the victims” and the outcome of the judicial process.

To Fundasaun Mahein, an NGO which works to strengthen the legal system, Gusmão’s intervention was “deeply damaging to the victims of this priest’s crimes and other victims of sexual abuse”. It would cause many to conclude that Daschbach is innocent and that “his victims must be lying or exaggerating”. (Gusmão’s media officer did not respond to Good Weekend’s request for comment.)

Swinburne University of Technology professor Michael Leach, a specialist in Timorese politics, notes a point of view in East Timor that Gusmão is supporting Daschbach in order to win the backing of conservative church figures at parliamentary elections due in 2023. “There appear to be powerful figures within the church who fear that if Daschbach is convicted, victims of other priests might come forward and open the floodgates for complaints,” Leach says.

Lately, Gusmão has put more than the justice system under strain by running what Leach calls “a very unhelpful line casting doubt on the gravity of COVID-19 and flouting the government’s social-distancing measures”. In late March, Dili went into lockdown to try to crush its first community transmission of COVID. Soon after, severe flooding made tens of thousands of residents homeless. As authorities struggled to respond, Gusmão led a rally of hundreds of people demanding the release of the body of Armindo Borges, 47, recorded as the nation’s second virus fatality.

Health Minister Odete Maria de Freitas Belo stood her ground as Gusmão told her he did not believe Borges was COVID-positive. Film of the protest showed him twice slapping a female member of Borges’s family hard in the face (he slapped a male relative of the dead man, too) and telling a female journalist to kneel and tie his shoelaces (she complied). The face-slapping sent “a very poor message in a country where domestic violence is another epidemic,” Leach says.

Before Daschbach’s disgrace, Topu Honis was an object of Western curiosity and altruism. Aid workers, academics, ambassadors and journalists negotiated the cratered dirt road from the coast or hiked through the forest to reach it. As word spread and support grew, Topu Honis opened a boarding house on the coast so highland children could attend secondary school.

Donors provided university scholarships and a former Topu Honis boy became the first Timorese to graduate from Duntroon Military College in Canberra. Australian and American families adopted several of its children.

Jan McColl and Tony Hamilton are among those who saw themselves as patrons of a worthy cause. McColl, who owns a real-estate agency in the central Victorian town of Kyneton, financed an extension to the Topu Honis boarding house and put orphans through university. She and Hamilton, who has a Brisbane manufacturing business and, unlike McColl, is Catholic, donated tens of thousands of dollars and raised additional funds in their communities.

“This is so embarrassing. We had so many generous people who helped,” says McColl. The enterprising 65-year-old spent several annual holidays in Oecusse, sometimes sleeping on the crowded deck of the overnight ferry from Dili and walking 16 kilometres up the mountain road after it was washed away by monsoon rain. On one visit, she and her husband Michael brought along their three adult children and partners, plus grandkids, to form a party of 12.

“Michael and I are ex-teachers and we thought Topu Honis was a lovely community,” she says. “We’ve shared lots of tears over this. It saddens us deeply to think that this abuse was going on and we didn’t pick it up.”

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Household mementos now take on a sinister aspect. “Richard loved photography,” Jan says. “Every year, he sent us a calendar and each month had a picture of one of the kids on it.”

Hamilton, an affable 61-year-old with a goatee beard below a ragged moustache, says he and his wife Therese, a registered nurse, found Daschbach to be “very knowledgeable and personable, a great conversationalist”. He readily adopted Therese’s suggestions to improve orphanage meals. “Everything we saw and heard was fantastic,” says Hamilton, whose geniality can’t hide a lingering hurt.

In April 2018, McColl and Hamilton took a 90-minute Air North flight from Darwin to Dili to investigate rumours that Daschbach had been accused of child abuse. “I expected he would deny it, but at least we would get a feel for what was going on,” Hamilton says. They were unaware that a month earlier, Daschbach had scrawled a handwritten note to the SVD’s then Superior General in Rome, Heinz Kulüke, admitting he’d abused children at Topu Honis from 1991 to “about 2012”. “It’s impossible for me to remember the faces of many of them, let alone the names. Who the victims would be I haven’t the faintest idea,” he wrote. He promised to “comply fully with any measures (penalties) that will be imposed.”

McColl and Hamilton have given affidavits to Timorese prosecutors detailing their encounters with Daschbach. Over lunch, McColl asked him, “Are you a paedophile?” She noted: “Without showing any emotion or remorse, he said, ‘Yes’… and he didn’t see it to be a problem. Tony and I got up from the table and left the restaurant. I was shaking.” Hamilton tells Good Weekend, “Not in my wildest dreams could I have imagined he would sit there eating his chicken rice and admit to everything.”

Next day, in the seminary courtyard, Daschbach told the Australians he had engaged in mutual masturbation and oral sex but no vaginal penetration. To McColl’s question, “Do you realise what harm you’ve done to these girls?“, he replied, “Oh, kids are tough.” When he said, of his prepubescent wards, “I only did it with those who wanted it,” Hamilton walked out of the compound and vomited in the street.

Hamilton’s last words to Daschbach were, “Your legacy will be an evil one.” It was the only time, Hamilton remembers, that Daschbach seemed upset. But William Burt, the Melbourne missionary, observes that people kneeled on the road and cried as Daschbach was driven to Oecusse courthouse on the trial’s opening day. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s freed and then, when he dies, they build a statue in his honour,” Burt says.

Could Daschbach’s supporters bend the legal system to his advantage? Jan McColl says he told her he wasn’t worried because “the law moves very slowly in Timor-Leste”. After opening in February, the trial was postponed four times at the request of his defence or because of his failure to show up. These were deliberate delaying tactics amounting to “psychological torture” of the victims, says JU,S Jurídico Social, a human rights law firm representing the complainants pro bono. “They have to get mentally prepared and relive the whole trauma in their minds – and then the hearing doesn’t happen,” says JU,S partner Maria Agnes Bere. The latest hearing – a June 7 video-conference session – was halted by technical problems and is due to resume on July 5.

Gusmão is listed as a defence witness and was conspicuous in the courtroom on the trial’s opening day. For the Fundasaun Mahein NGO, the case “will determine whether the rule of law really exists in East Timor, or whether the justice process can simply be hijacked for political purposes by powerful leaders”. Swinburne University’s Michael Leach agrees that Gusmão’s involvement “represents a potential challenge to a fair trial and increases the difficulty of witnesses testifying”. Even if Daschbach escapes punishment, he is wanted in the US, for wire fraud linked to one of his US donors.

The scandal has prompted efforts to change community attitudes. Photos and video clips of women and men raising placards that condemn sexual abuse of children fill the timeline of a new Facebook page – the first shot in a national education campaign by community groups. Child abuse is “endemic and widespread” and “permeates every layer of Timorese society”, according to JU,S Jurídico Social.

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Nona hopes the trial will help victims of other abusers to “be brave enough to speak the truth. In the future, some girl will remember how we spoke up and it will give her confidence that maybe she will be believed.” She recalls her visit to Kutet more than three years ago, when she fell into conversation with Daschbach. He asked about her plans and sought advice about his new phone.

“After being away for years, I still felt like I owed this man who abused me an explanation of what I’m going to do with my life,” she says. Then a child ran past. “Richard grabbed her and put her on his knee, like he used to do with me and all the other girls. At that point, it just hit me that I needed to speak up for little girls like her.”

If you or anyone you know needs support, you can contact the National Sexual Assault, Domestic and Family Violence Counselling Service on 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732), Lifeline 131 114, or beyondblue 1300 224 636.

https://www.1800respect.org.au

https://www.lifeline.org.au

https://www.beyondblue.org.au

https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/don-t-be-disrespectful-he-ll-be-upset-if-you-don-t-sleep-with-him-20210622-p58398.html

How Ghislaine Maxwell went from high society to being accused of sex trafficking

After a family tragedy turned her world upside down, she met Jeffrey Epstein.

Allie Yang, James Hill, and Ali Dukakis - 26 June 2021

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Ghislaine Maxwell was born into fame and fortune. It seemed to suit her.

At star-studded events, the glamorous socialite appeared next to A-listers and mingled with heads of state. Then, her world was turned upside down after the sudden death and ensuing scandal of her media magnate father.

Soon afterward, she found herself in the company of now-infamous financier Jeffrey Epstein. Their connection reportedly started as a romance but later became a close friendship and business partnership, as well as an alleged sordid scheme for Epstein to sexually abuse multiple young women.

Epstein is now dead by suicide after he was arrested for alleged sex trafficking, and Maxwell awaits her trial at a New York prison for charges accusing her of enticing a minor to travel to engage in criminal sexual activity, transporting a minor with the intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, conspiracy to commit both of those offenses, and perjury in connection with a sworn deposition. She has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Her lawyer says she’s being kept in inhumane conditions and alleges the government wants to “make sure she can’t prepare for trial,” while the government says she is treated equitably and actually has more time than other inmates to prepare. How did she end up here?

1961: Ghislaine Maxwell is born in France

Ghislaine Maxwell is the youngest of nine children, born on Christmas Day in 1961. Days after her birth, her eldest brother Michael was badly injured in a car crash and was in a coma for seven years.

“The whole family were completely shattered because he was in many ways … the leader of the tribe and he was the apple of my parents' eyes,” her brother, Ian Maxwell, told “20/20.” “Ghislaine was, to an extent, really ignored.”

Their father, Robert Maxwell, was a flamboyant billionaire, a larger-than-life British icon and a media tycoon in the 1970s and 1980s.

“Being with him and around him was always quite tense because he was demanding and difficult,” Ian Maxwell said. “So one tended to be not too close, if one could avoid it.”

Ghislaine Maxwell was born into incredible wealth, but her father was not. He was born Ján Ludvík Hoch to a poor Hasidic Jewish family in Czechoslovakia. Many of his family members were killed in the Holocaust.

“He was one of nine children himself,” said Ian Maxwell. “They were so poor that they had to share shoes, and they all slept in the same room.”

By the time Robert Maxwell was 23 years old, he'd changed his name four times. He earned medals in World War II, where he began to rub shoulders with upper-class British soldiers, and picked up a posh British accent.

Ian Maxwell said that despite their father’s brusque personality, he still “spoiled” Ghislaine.

“I think I could see that, and maybe it was my parents feeling guilty that they had ignored her, really, for the first few years of her life,” Ian Maxwell said.

1983-1991: Ghislaine Maxwell works for her father’s companies

Robert Maxwell set his daughter up with a job on one of the soccer teams he owned, Oxford United. At age 22, she was suddenly working among executives at the club. She also did various work for her father’s Mirror Group newspapers.

She was given a job at her father’s paper “The European,” but he had ambitions of expanding beyond Europe to the United States. In May 1991, he bought the New York Daily News and Ghislaine Maxwell went with him to the states.

Carolyn Hinsey was named the paper’s “communications ambassador” under Robert Maxwell.

“When he realized the Daily News didn’t have its own kitchen, he moved us to the Waldorf for $4,000 a night, to a huge suite where he could have many rooms, we could have an office,” Hinsey said. “He had a kitchen, a dining room – the butler could serve him there.”

Hinsey said that Ghislaine Maxwell asked to be the Daily News’s fashion editor, not realizing that the paper was more apt to cover crime and sports.

“I don't think she was used to being told ‘no,’ because when [Robert] Maxwell told her no, she seemed surprised,” Hinsey said. “Like, ‘But you just bought the paper. Why can't I have this job?’ Because the job doesn't exist and the editor doesn't want you. That's why.”

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Nov. 5, 1991: The end of an empire

Nine months after Robert Maxwell bought the Daily News, he took his yacht, which he’d named the Lady Ghislaine, to the Spanish archipelago of the Canary Islands off the coast of Morocco.

On the morning of Nov. 5, 1991, his crew couldn’t find him and realized he’d gone overboard during the night. Authorities found his body floating in the water.

Theories swirled about whether it was a heart attack, an accident or a suicide. The official cause of death in 1991 was a heart attack combined with drowning.

“Ghislaine, however, uniquely in our family, has always thought he was murdered, and she's alone in that,” Ian Maxwell said. “But it's her profound conviction that that is what happened.”

Shortly after Robert Maxwell’s death, it was discovered that he had plundered hundreds of millions of dollars from his employee pension funds in the U.K. to prop up his crumbling business empire.

His two sons, Kevin and Ian Maxwell, were tried for fraud in connection to the pension money but were acquitted and cleared of any wrongdoing.

Robert Maxwell’s empire collapsed and his family had to leave their home in Oxford, England. His possessions were auctioned off.

“Ghislaine is the baby of the family and the one who was closest to her father,” her mother, Elisabeth Maxwell, told Vanity Fair in a March 1992 article. “The whole of Ghislaine’s world has collapsed, and it will be very difficult for her to continue.”

Less than a year after her father’s death, British photographers spotted her at Heathrow Airport in London with Jeffrey Epstein.

Epstein was a Brooklyn native who had previously taught math at a private New York City prep school. He moved into the banking world and climbed through the ranks, eventually opening his own consulting firm, which he claimed catered exclusively to billionaires. In the late 1980s, he managed the financial affairs of billionaire Leslie Wexner, founder of L Brands, which includes Victoria’s Secret and Bath and Body Works.

In a 2016 deposition, Ghislaine Maxwell said she met Epstein at some point in 1991 through a mutual friend. Ian Maxwell said he met Epstein briefly but generally had “no knowledge of their life or life that Ghislaine was leading [at the time] in any great detail.”

“You can meet some people [and] you really feel that this is a great guy to have a drink with. I never had that impression,” he said of Epstein. “But he was clearly an intelligent man and he had a charisma.”

Theories swirled about the couple’s power through his money and her A-list connections.

“My father was an extraordinarily well-connected man. So she had grown up in that world and was able to move in it very freely,” Ian Maxwell said.

The couple mingled publicly with Donald Trump, British royals like Prince Andrew and even attended a reception for donors in 1993 at Bill Clinton’s White House.

1994: Earliest accusations of grooming and sex abuse

Federal prosecutors now say Ghislaine Maxwell first assisted in the sexual exploitation of minor girls by Epstein in 1994. Annie Farmer has publicly identified herself as one of the underage victims at the center of the criminal case against Ghislaine Maxwell.

In 1995, Maria Farmer was working for Jeffrey Epstein as a receptionist at his New York City townhouse, which is where she says she came to know Ghislaine Maxwell.

“Ghislaine was 100% the lady of the house at Jeffrey's. He made that very clear. We knew who was in charge and it was Ghislaine,” Farmer, a 25-year-old aspiring artist at the time, told “20/20.”

When Maxwell asked about her family, Farmer said she spoke about her little sister Annie, who was still in high school and would be looking at colleges soon. Farmer said Ghislaine Maxwell suggested she talk to Epstein about it.

“What I understood was that Maria had a very wealthy boss and that he might want to help me with school,” Annie Farmer told “20/20.” “I just thought, ‘Wow, this sounds like a great opportunity.’”

Annie Farmer said Epstein called her mother to tell her about a supposed program that would include 20 to 25 students from all over the U.S., and that Ghislaine Maxwell would be the chaperone. Believing the offer to be legitimate, Annie Farmer traveled to Epstein’s ranch in New Mexico. When Farmer arrived at the ranch far outside of Santa Fe, she said she realized there were no other students there and seemingly no school program at all. She was alone with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

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“It wasn't an immediate alarm. It was just sort of, ‘OK. I guess this is somewhat different than what I must have misunderstood,’” she said. “I remember that I had brought some homework with me that I needed to work on… I think I was actually doing a paper about some British writers.”

Annie Farmer described Ghislaine Maxwell as “witty and quick and instantly engaging in conversation,” and said that she “felt quickly comfortable” talking to her about the assignment on British writers.

“As a young woman I looked up to her as an older sister type,” Annie Farmer said.

Maxwell took her shopping around Santa Fe, Annie Farmer said, and she encouraged her to pick out things she’d liked, including $100 cowboy boots.

“The first thing that gave me pause was I remember being in this living room area with Epstein and Maxwell, and Maxwell telling me that Epstein really liked to get foot rubs, and that it would be a good idea for me to learn how to massage his feet,” Annie Farmer said. “I think if Epstein had been suggesting that, I would have been clearly alarmed. But because it was her, I was more open to that… They were really really good at figuring out how to push boundaries so that I didn’t say, ‘No I’m not going to do this.’ I just felt uneasy, but [I] did it.”

Annie Farmer said the trio went to see “Primal Fear” at a theater, a movie that contains sexual content and themes of pedophilia.

“It was uncomfortable to be exposed to that with him,” she said. “Epstein sat himself next to me, and very quickly started holding my hand and caressing me, and kind of touching my feet and my leg.”

In court filings, Annie Farmer said Ghislaine Maxwell repeatedly insisted on giving her a massage.

“I was very aware that the door was opened and I could be seen getting a massage, and then at some point she just takes the sheet down, so she exposed my breasts,” Annie Farmer said. “I feel uncomfortable. I feel like Epstein can probably see me right now. She touches me around my chest … blurring the boundaries of normal or not normal… This was such a scary situation for me, so I just needed to just manage that and to go on as if everything was normal.”

At only 16 years old, Annie Farmer was completely isolated on the ranch while her family was back home in Arizona.

At one point, she said Epstein came into her bedroom, got in bed with her and tried to sexually assault her. Annie says that Epstein physically restrained her and started pressing up against her. And she says she was frozen in fear. She said she remembered getting out of bed, going to the bathroom and shutting the door.

“My sister never shared with me anything about what had happened with Ghislaine and Jeffrey. I didn't understand until much later,” Maria Farmer said. “They thought it was OK to touch a 16-year-old, the person that I loved more than anyone in the world, and there is nothing OK about that.”

In 2019, Annie Farmer filed a lawsuit against Jeffrey Epstein’s estate and Ghislaine Maxwell. She eventually accepted a compensation offer from the Epstein Victims’ Compensation Fund, which required her to drop her lawsuit.

Annie Farmer’s story represents one of the first cases in which Ghislaine Maxwell allegedly played a role in grooming and luring underage girls to Epstein. In court filings, Ghislaine Maxwell’s lawyers say that she denies involvement in any of the activity that Annie Farmer says took place.

“Maxwell was a really important part of the grooming process,” Annie Farmer said. “They worked together as a team, I think.”

2000: Ghislaine Maxwell manages Jeffrey Epstein’s properties

Maxwell moved to a $5 million mansion on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, five blocks south of Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion.

In a 2016 deposition, she said she hired assistants, architects, decorators, cooks and cleaners for his properties. She also said that from time to time, she would visit spas.

“I would visit professional spas, I would receive a massage and if the massage was good I would ask that man or woman if they did home visits,” she said.

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2001: Massage trainees Chauntae Davies and Teresa Helm say they are lured to Jeffrey Epstein’s home

Chauntae Davies says she met Ghislaine Maxwell at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. Davies was 21 years old and training to be a massage therapist.

“[Ghislaine Maxwell] called and offered to have me fly out for the weekend to work as her masseuse in Palm Beach,” Davies said. “I was just bugging out that I was going at all. I had never been on a private plane before. I had barely been anywhere, really.”

Around that same time, 22-year-old Teresa Helm was also studying to be a masseuse when she says she was approached by someone with a job offer to work for a wealthy couple and was told to meet Maxwell in New York for an interview.

She later filed a lawsuit against Epstein’s estate for her alleged abuse.

“It was going to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity; that I would be flying, traveling the world being a personal, private massage therapist,” Helm told “20/20.”

Helm said that after arriving at Ghislaine Maxwell’s townhouse, she gave her a massage. Then, she said she was suddenly told to meet Maxwell’s partner as the second part of the “interview.”

“That was the first time I had heard anything about meeting anyone else,” Helm said. “She told me to give Jeffrey what he wants because Jeffrey always gets what he wants.”

Helm said she walked through an “elaborate door” to Epstein’s mansion on the Upper East Side; he led her to his office, where he asked for a foot massage.

“He puts his foot up on my leg and I start giving him a foot massage. … He starts pushing his foot closer and closer to me to the point where his foot is literally pressing up against my body,” Helm said. “He grabbed my chin in his hand and he said to me, ‘I know I can always trust a woman who shows her gums when she smiles.’… I was very scared, so I get up from the couch … and he grabbed me from behind. I just completely froze and he assaulted me in the hallway.”

“When I made it to the door, he said to me, ‘Don't do anything that I wouldn't do,’” she added. “I took that as a direct threat.”

Davies has a similar story. She said she set up her massage table at Epstein’s Palm Beach home and he came into the room.

“[He] gave me a little once over. I started the massage, and he was asking me questions … [like] how I liked massage school,” Davies said. “He flipped over, and he asked if I minded if he touched himself, and I freeze. I remember being so confused. … I didn't know what to say. I said, ‘Sure.’”

Helm never spoke to Ghislaine Maxwell or Epstein again, but Davies said she continued to occasionally work for and travel with them. Davies says that Epstein sexually assaulted her on numerous occasions.

“I had already come from a background in which I had been taught to accept abuse,” she said. “It just became a situation, where I just got deeper and deeper into it and I didn't know how to pull myself out really.”

Davies says Ghislaine Maxwell was “the puppeteer in it all.”

“She knew how she was playing me. She knew how she was setting me up. She knew exactly that she was delivering me to the home of a predator,” Helm said. “Ghislaine Maxwell is a master manipulator of human emotion and environment.”

Helm accepted a compensation offer from Epstein’s victims fund last year, which required her to withdraw her lawsuit. Davies and Helm are not part of the criminal case against Ghislaine Maxwell and they didn’t file lawsuits against her. Maxwell has never formally responded to their claims, but she has broadly denied any knowledge of Epstein's crimes or involvement in any illegal activity.

“Every allegation should be taken seriously, but that doesn't mean every allegation should be believed without questioning. Without scrutiny,” David Oscar Markus, Maxwell’s appellate lawyer, told “20/20.” “Ghislaine [has] never admitted to any wrongdoing because she's not done anything wrong. She's been fighting about this now in civil and criminal litigation saying she's innocent.”

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2005: Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged Palm Beach victims come forward

A 14-year-old girl came forward to police, saying she’d gone to Epstein’s home to give him a massage and that she was sexually assaulted while there. The Palm Beach police began an investigation, bringing in more victims who alleged that Epstein had offered them money for sexual acts.

Each accuser had a similar story: Once inside the house, they would be taken upstairs to Epstein’s bedroom, where he would enter wearing only a towel. They said they’d rub his back or feet and eventually, he’d turn over nude and assault them.

Ghislaine Maxwell says she was very rarely in Florida at the time of the police investigation in Palm Beach.

“The nature of my work relationship with him changed over time. So, from around 2002, 2003, the work lessened considerably,” she said in a deposition years later. “I ceased to be happy in the job and I ceased to be happy spending time with Mr. Epstein.”

Investigators knew Ghislaine Maxwell was closely associated with Epstein, but at the time, Palm Beach police did not consider her a suspect and did not develop any evidence that she was involved in the alleged child sex abuse, according to the depositions given years later by the lead detective on the case.

2006: Epstein faces charges in connection to Palm Beach victims

Epstein was arrested in Palm Beach and charged by a grand jury with one count of solicitation of a prostitute. The indictment didn’t mention any underage victims or minors.

However, after finding multiple alleged victims, Palm Beach police were unhappy with this single charge and contacted the FBI, which continued the investigation and identified additional victims. They also spoke with Maria and Annie Farmer.

“The fact that the FBI came to visit me suggested that they were aware that this was a much wider scheme, that this was not limited to what was happening in Florida,” Annie Farmer said.

June 30, 2008: Jeffrey Epstein quietly cuts a deal

Epstein took a plea deal in state court to avert federal charges. He pleaded guilty to one count of solicitation of prostitution plus one charge of solicitation of a minor and served 13 months in Palm Beach County Jail.

Despite his new status as a convicted sex offender, Ghislaine Maxwell didn’t completely cut ties with him. In a deposition she said that even after he was behind bars, she continued to do occasional work at his properties.

“I'm a very loyal person and Jeffrey was very good to me when my father passed away,” she said in the 2016 deposition. “I felt that it was a very thoughtful, nice thing for me to do to help in a very limited fashion.

Summer 2009: Virginia Roberts Giuffre files a lawsuit against Jeffrey Epstein

Giuffre filed the lawsuit against Epstein under the pseudonym Jane Doe 102. She alleged that Ghislaine Maxwell had recruited her when she had been working at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump's Florida resort, as a changing room assistant. She was a teenager at the time.

Maxwell took Giuffre to Epstein, Giuffre alleged in her lawsuit. She says she found him lying naked on a massage table, she was instructed to take off her clothes and both Maxwell and Epstein touched her.

Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell carried on with her for years, she alleges, and that they made her their “sex slave.”

The lawsuit was the first time Ghislaine Maxwell had been publicly accused of being one of Epstein’s main accomplices.

Epstein settled his lawsuit with Jane Doe 102, or Virginia Roberts Guiffre, in 2009.

2012-2015: Ghislaine Maxwell does press for nonprofit, then sex trafficking allegations resurface

She created TerraMar, an organization to educate people about the ocean and its conservation.

She spoke about the organization at the United Nations, in a video series with the Huffington Post, and CNN.

Then, in 2015, Giuffre’s allegations came back into the spotlight. In new court filings in a case brought by alleged victims of Epstein challenging his deal with the U.S. Government, Giuffre went into greater detail about Maxwell’s alleged role in Epstein’s sex trafficking.

For the first time in court, Giuffre, under the psuedonym Jane Doe 3, claimed that Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell had directed her to have sex with Prince Andrew on three occasions. Maxwell, through an agent, released a statement saying Giuffre’s claims are “obvious lies.”

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On behalf of Prince Andrew, Buckingham Palace issued a statement in 2015 emphatically denying that the Prince had had any form of sexual contact or relationship with Giuffre.

The Prince himself echoed those denials during a speech a few weeks later in Switzerland.

Giuffre's lawyers say their requests for a statement under oath from the Duke, about the allegations, were unanswered.

Later in 2015, a Florida judge ruled that Giuffre’s allegations involving Maxwell and other third parties were unnecessary in the case against the government and ordered those accusations stricken from the public record of the case. The court made no ruling on the merit of Giuffre’s allegations.

GIuffre subsequently sued Maxwell for defamation. That case settled just prior to the scheduled trial date in 2017 with no admission of wrongdoing.

July 2019: Jeffrey Epstein is arrested again

On July 6, Epstein was arrested at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, fresh off a flight from Paris.

“I never dreamed that he would be arrested,” Annie Farmer said.

Prosecutors charged Epstein with sex trafficking and sex trafficking conspiracy, meaning he didn’t act alone.

Aug. 10, 2019: Jeffrey Epstein kills himself behind bars

As the news media’s focus shifted to the system’s failure to prevent Epstein’s suicide, it also moved to Ghislaine Maxwell’s alleged role in the scheme.

“I just hope … there's justice and I hope there's accountability and I hope there's significant consequence for the behaviors of Ghislaine Maxwell,” Helm told “20/20.”

“Let me assure you that this case will continue on against anyone who was complicit with Epstein,” then-Attorney General Bill Barr said on August 12, 2019. “Any co-conspirators should not rest easy. The victims deserve justice, and they will get it.”

Maxwell had three passports British, French and American and a fortune of $20 million spread between a list of bank accounts. There were many theories about where in the world she could be.

“Epstein is dead… The crimes he was then indicted with in 2019, he never faced. But Ghislaine is not Epstein,” Ian Maxwell said. “The real problem [is] that the media frenzy about her… It's the same old rubbish. So that's all that the public has ever heard. They've never heard the defense to all of this.”

In November 2019, Prince Andrew went on BBC’s “Newsnight” in a rare highly-anticipated interview to address his relationship with Epstein.

He claimed he was unaware that Epstein was having sex with underage girls and said he had no memory of meeting Giuffre, even suggesting that the photograph of them together may have been faked. He faced severe criticism for the interview and was later forced to resign from royal duties.

July 2, 2020: Maxwell is arrested in New Hampshire

A year after Epstein’s arrest, the FBI arrived at Maxwell’s door. She had moved to a remote estate in New Hampshire, nicknamed “Tucked Away.”

Maxwell had "slithered away to a gorgeous property in New Hampshire, continuing to live a life of privilege while her victims continue to live with the trauma inflicted upon them years ago," said Bill Sweeney, the assistant director of the FBI’s New York Field Office, at a news conference announcing Maxwell’s arrest.

Her brother refutes that she was hiding, saying her lawyers knew “where she was at all times.”

Prosecutors allege that Maxwell didn’t open the door when the agents arrived and moved to an interior room of the house, forcing the agents to breach the door to get inside.

“She's arrested with hoopla, with helicopters and the FBI running about. It's pure prejudice,” Ian Maxwell said. “If she was gonna run away with her French passport, her English passport, she could have hopped on a plane any moment. Her lawyers knew exactly where she was at all times.”

At the time of her arrest, Maxwell informed authorities that she had been married since 2016 – a surprise revelation to prosecutors, the public and even Maxwell’s own family.

“I mean, it was surprising,” Ian Maxwell said. “Ghislaine took the view that she's entitled to a private life and she's going to have it and it's going to be private including from her own family. That's okay. I'm alright with that. I don't see that's so wrong.”

Maxwell's spouse, whose name has been redacted from the public version of court filings, told the court in a letter last December advocating for her release on bail that the person described in the federal government's criminal charges is "not the person we know."

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Audrey Strauss, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, charged Ghislaine Maxwell with helping Epstein to sexually exploit and abuse minor girls from 1994 to 1997.

“Maxwell played a critical role in helping Epstein to identify, befriend and groom minor victims for abuse. In some cases, Maxwell participated in the abuse herself,” Strauss said. “Maxwell's presence as an adult woman helped put the victims at ease.”

There were three unnamed victims in the initial indictment. Prosecutors allege that Ghislaine Maxwell groomed one girl of about 14 years old to engage in sex acts with Epstein in New York and Florida multiple times. Ghislaine Maxwell encouraged another underage girl in London, the government says, to massage Epstein, knowing that he would engage in sex acts with the girl during the massages.

Annie Farmer publicly identified herself as one of the victims and addressed the court via video conference to urge the judge to keep Maxwell detained until trial.

“[Maxwell] is a sexual predator who groomed and abused me and countless other children and young women. She has never shown any remorse for her heinous crimes, for the devastating, lasting effects her actions caused,” Farmer told the court during Maxwell’s initial hearing last July.

Maxwell has pleaded not guilty to all the charges against her.

“These are very serious charges,” Ian Maxwell said. “But at the same time, I also thought this is not my sister. She could not possibly have been involved in this kind of activity.”

Maxwell’s defenders contend that the federal government chose to pursue the case against her only after Epstein’s death and the ensuing outcry from his alleged victims and the public.

“She wouldn't have even been charged had she not been associated with Epstein,” Markus said. “Epstein died. They need someone. Let's be honest about what's going on here. If there was real evidence, she would have been charged long ago.”

Prosecutors have rejected the defense’s argument that Maxwell was targeted as a substitute for Epstein. They say the “driving force” behind the case is that the “victims were sexually abused as minors as a direct result of Ghislaine Maxwell’s actions, and they have carried the trauma from these events for their entire adult lives. They deserve to see her brought to justice at a trial,” according to a government filing last summer.

In her attempts to be released on bail pending trial, more than a dozen of Ghislaine Maxwell’s friends and relatives wrote letters to the court as part of her bail application.

Despite what Maxwell’s team says was a considerable offer, including relinquishing her citizenship in both Britain and France, she has been denied bail on five separate occasions by the trial court and an appeals court. U.S. District Court Judge Alison Nathan, who is overseeing Maxwell’s criminal trial, has determined that Maxwell is a flight risk.

“People like Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Bernie Madoff, heck, even John Gotti was released on bond [and were] accused of much more serious crimes,” Markus said. “Why do they get the presumption of innocence when a 59-year-old woman accused of much less serious crimes than them has to be detained?”

Maxwell is being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. The Maxwell family built a website where they post information about her and the case.

“I visited Ghislaine Maxwell at the jail and anybody who would see the condition she's under would be shocked. She's stuck in a small 6-by-9-foot room,” Markus said. “She's basically kept in solitary confinement unless you count the rats and the cockroaches as roommates.”

Ian Maxwell says she’s poorly fed and “has no sleep of any real quality” because of the constant surveillance from guards, including regular flashlight checks of her cell at night.

The federal Bureau of Prisons has defended its treatment of Maxwell, saying the regular checks with flashlights are done by pointing the light at the ceiling of the cell. They also said despite forbidding the use of eye masks, Maxwell was allowed to use non-contraband items to cover her eyes, like other inmates.

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March 2021: A new indictment against Ghislaine Maxwell

Prosecutors filed an additional indictment with an additional underage victim. They say Ghislaine Maxwell interacted multiple times with this fourth victim at Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion in the early 2000s.

Prosecutors allege Ghislaine Maxwell was present when the girl was nude in Epstein’s massage room, and that Ghislaine Maxwell called her to schedule appointments and encouraged her to recruit other young females to provide sexualized massages to Epstein.

Ghislaine Maxwell appeared in a courtroom for the first time since her arrest in July 2020 and her defense attorney entered a not guilty plea on her behalf. Her appearance at the time was in stark contrast to her glamorous image of the past.

“That's how frail she is,” Markus said. “No one under those conditions can effectively and adequately prepare for trial.

The government has defended Ghislaine Maxwell’s treatment, and said that she has “more time … than any other inmate” in the facility, “13 hours per day, seven days per week,” to review documents from her case. She is also permitted 25 hours of video calls with her attorneys each week, it said.

November 2021: Ghislaine Maxwell’s upcoming trial

Maxwell’s trial is scheduled to begin in late November, on the Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday.

Prosecutors have contended in court filings that they have a strong case. They say it will be anchored by the testimony of the four alleged victims, and they say there will be other witnesses and documents confirming that those alleged victims were with Maxwell and Epstein where and when they said they were.

"Wait till the trial. People shouldn't make up their mind just yet,” Markus said. “Let's see what people say under oath and after they're cross-examined.”

Helm says Ghislaine Maxwell is “not a replacement for Jeffrey Epstein,” and that she too must face the consequences of her alleged crimes.

“Not even the slightest bit. Her crimes and her wrongdoing, she has made herself complicit,” she said. “She is a criminal. She's a predator.”

Ultimately, the decision of whether Maxwell was involved in these terrible stories of abuse, or whether she’s innocent and just a scapegoat, will lie in the hands of the jury.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/ghislaine-maxwell-high-society-accused-sex-trafficking/story?id=78474060