The Ben Roberts-Smith defamation hearing took a new turn yesterday when his former lover entered the witness box in Sydney’s Federal Court, to be asked about her toxic, six-month relationship with the former war hero and married man.
She cannot be identified by name or any form of description. And due to COVID rules, the hearing is being conducted with only the judge, lawyers and witnesses in the courtroom, with the camera turned away from the witness box for her evidence. Most journalists are watching the live feed, in which Roberts-Smith is clearly visible in the back row of the small court. During the first part of the woman’s evidence, he sat staring at his phone, unwilling to look at her.
However, after twenty minutes of questioning by her own barrister, she started sobbing, causing him to look up momentarily in her direction. She continued crying as she related the twists and turns of an extra-marital affair that has the potential to ruin both their lives.
Person 17 is in this hearing because she has made an allegation that he punched her in the side of the head after a formal dinner in Parliament House in March 2018. He has strenuously denied this, saying that she injured herself by falling down some stairs at the function because she was drunk.
In a polished, quiet voice, the woman described the relationship like “crack cocaine”; addictive and ultimately self-destructive. This six-month folie à deux has cost her a great deal. Although her identity has been suppressed, she told the court that she lives in a regional city where everyone knows each other. There’s no way that her neighbours and colleagues would not know who she was.
For Roberts-Smith, the stakes are sky-high. He is currently suing three newspapers over a series of stories in 2018 that he says portray him as a war criminal and accuse him of the act of domestic violence against Person 17. He denies all wrongdoing; the media outlets are seeking to rely on a defence of truth. But there is little more damaging than accusing a man of punching a woman, especially when that man is 6’7” and a trained fighter. His reputation is in tatters.
This morning Person 17 appeared in the witness box and within five minutes, burst into tears.
She said that she anonymously contacted Nine journalist Nick McKenzie because he had been writing stories about Roberts-Smith’s military actions.
They met in her hotel room in Melbourne and spoke for a few hours about the affair with Roberts-Smith and the alleged assault.
She told McKenzie that she was afraid of being followed. She said she was not telling him this because she wanted it to become public, but because “I just want to know what I’m caught up in”.
Person 17 said she told him that she was scared but didn’t think the police wanted to take it seriously. “He said that I should report it to the police and I shouldn’t be living in fear of him.”
Earlier, she gave evidence that she had gone twice to the police station in the town in which she lives. The first time she told the person at the front desk that she wanted to report an assault but that she needed to speak to someone senior. She said that she had been having an affair with a high-profile military person and was afraid of what he was going to do to her. However the police declined to act because she would not name him.
In yesterday’s session, Nicholas Owens SC, representing the three newspapers, took Person 17 through the chronology of the relationship. She said they had met in October 2017 at a charity lunch where the former soldier was guest speaker and the woman and her husband were attendees. After the lunch, she had gone to “an exclusive after-party event” for event sponsors, leaving her husband to go home and look after the children. There, she and Roberts-Smith started talking.
“I told him about the problems I’d been having in my marriage and he said it was the same for him.” That night, they went to a hotel room and had sex “several times”. After that, they met up approximately every ten days and usually spent one or two nights together in a hotel.
By the third time they met, it had become “a really intense, passionate and fast-moving relationship which was all-consuming”, she said. “We couldn’t get enough of each other.”
Her husband, who had had an extra-marital affair the previous year, knew about the relationship and accepted it, she said. Roberts-Smith’s former wife Emma Roberts has given evidence that she knew nothing about the affair with Person 17 until the following April, when she turned up at the Roberts-Smith’s family home.
The woman said that the soldier bought a disposable “burner” phone to speak to her and told her to download apps like WhatsApp and Telegram. They talked about getting married — he promised her a pink Argyle diamond engagement ring — and moving to Dallas, Texas, where he knew he could get a job with Kerry Stokes’ company, WesTrac.
She said that while she and her husband accepted the fact that their marriage was essentially over, they decided to keep up appearances until after a long-planned, end-of-year sojourn to London, where they stayed in Chelsea and she accompanied her daughter to a dance competition in Switzerland.
During this time, Person 17 discovered she was pregnant and knew that Roberts-Smith was the father as he was the only person she had slept with.
When she got back to Australia, they talked about the situation and he persuaded her that their best option was a termination. They arranged a date for the procedure but in the meantime she suffered a miscarriage, she said. When the date for the procedure came round, she flew to Brisbane and went to the Greenslopes Clinic, where the original booking had been made. From there, she took a taxi to the hotel to meet Roberts-Smith, who confronted her with video footage of her leaving the clinic, saying that he’d hired a private investigator to follow her because he suspected that she hadn’t been pregnant.
Last year he gave evidence that Person 17 had given him three different versions of what had happened to the alleged pregnancy and had made up the story to stop him from ending the relationship.
He demanded that she take a pregnancy test, which was positive. (Women can test positive on a pregnancy test for several days after losing a pregnancy.) They had dinner in the hotel restaurant, where he told her that he was “not someone to get on the wrong side of” and that he could also get into her bank accounts.
Despite this, they continued to see each other. In March she travelled to Canberra to stay with him while he attended a military veteran’s function at Parliament House. During the day, they visited a winery and shared a cocktail and two bottles of wine. At the dinner, she continued drinking to the point where she was “quite drunk”, she said. At the end of the official speeches, when everyone got up to mingle, he signalled to her that they needed to leave; when she followed him down some stairs to the car park, she fell and hit her head.
After this, she was picked up and escorted to a car with Roberts-Smith, where there was a discussion about whether she needed to go to hospital. The former soldier said that she didn’t need to go and that he would look after her in the hotel room.
When they got up to the room, she said that he grabbed her by the shoulders and shouted, “Fuck (name) what have you done? You were all over the other men at dinner, I should have just left you there. I let you into my world and you treated it like a high school formal.”
“I said I was sorry,” she said. “I knew I had behaved badly. I said my head was hurting; could we please go to bed and forget about it?”
At this point, he punched her with his right fist on the left side of her face, she said. After that, she remembered nothing until she woke up in the middle of the night and went to the bathroom. Later in the night she woke up and they had sex, after which he told her that “it was all going to be OK”.
“I was apologising to him and saying that I loved him,” she said. “I told him how sorry I was.”
The next morning, he woke up at 5am and packed his bags, ready to leave. He showed her three photos he had taken of her, naked and asleep in the bed. He asked her, “Do I need to keep these photos?” she said.
The next morning, by which stage her eye was black and swollen, they flew back to Brisbane, where he told her to lie to her husband and tell him that she had been alone in Brisbane and had fallen over after taking a sleeping pill.
She took a photo of her bruised face and sent it to her husband, who texted, “Did Ben do that to you?” She denied it for a few days but by the weekend had broken down and told him what had happened in Canberra.
Eventually, the lovers spoke on the phone, agreeing that the relationship had to end because it had become “toxic and bad for both of us”, she said. She said she asked to see him one more time and they agreed to meet up in Brisbane for a night.
While they were having a drink in the hotel bar, he told her that she was “like crack and I will find it hard to give you up”.
Our relationship was “like an addiction; we couldn’t stop, although we both knew it was bad for us”, she told the court.
Over dinner, he told her that “he was a good friend to have, and not someone I would want to get on the wrong side of”, she said, adding that he said that if he wanted to he could get into her bank accounts.
He also said, “don’t do anything stupid or I will burn your house down and it may not be you that gets hurt”, she said.
Person 17 said that after dinner they spent the night together and had sex and afterwards she was crying because she knew the relationship was over.
The next morning, she looked at his driver’s licence when he was in the shower and noted his home address. Then, after they travelled to the airport and he had flown to another city, she travelled to his home on the Sunshine Coast. At the front door, she met the couple’s housekeeper who told her that Emma was out with the children. She asked the housekeeper to call Emma on the phone; when Person 17 spoke to Emma and told her her name, Roberts-Smith’s wife had no idea who she was.
When Emma arrived back at the house and saw Person 17, she asked her, “Do you want money?”
The hearing resumes this afternoon.
