ALL it took to kill the career of Theo Theophanous was for a mentally unstable liar to accuse him of rape.
It didn't matter that the accuser, let's call her Helen, was an "entirely unreliable witness", as magistrate Peter Reardon last week found.
It didn't matter that she at times was barely "clinging to reality, if not her sanity". Nor did it matter that the prosecution case built on her allegation was rightly described by Reardon as "inherently weak", lacking "credibility, reliability and truthfulness".
No, it was enough that Theophanous was accused of rape, which in this age of victimhood means guilt is assumed and the accuser not questioned.
And so this week, betrayed and vilified, Theophanous was obliged to announce his retirement from politics, despite having had the case against him thrown out even before it got to a jury.
Thus ended the career of a man who'd been a successful and senior minister under three Labor premiers.
You may wonder how I can be so damning when this seems just one of those he-said-she-said ambiguities.
But we either believe in the principle of innocent until proven guilty or we live under the tyranny of the pointing finger.
What's more, the evidence suggests Theophanous is the victim not only
of a false allegation, but of grave misjudgments, and even prejudice, by the police, prosecution and press.
Judge for yourself.
Three years ago Bruce Burdon-Smith, a commercial lawyer in Melbourne, received an email from a woman in Greece he'd never met.
It was Helen, who said she'd been recommended a "shark" to help her get "justice in the form of dollars".
She told Burdon-Smith that Theophanous, a friend in the Greek community, had years earlier taken her to Parliament late one night. When they reached his office, he'd pushed her back on a velvet couch and raped her.
She'd kept quiet, she later added, because "Theophanous is capable of violence and foul play", but her life had been destroyed.
She'd left her teaching job, turned to drink, abused drugs, suffered a mental breakdown and fled to Greece. As she put it: "I can't have a relationship. I can't go out. It's like I'm a ghost."
Burdon-Smith helped Helen prepare a draft statement of complaint, which by March 2007 found its slow way to Detective Senior Sergeant Doug Smith of the Sexual Crimes Squad. And that's when things really went off the rails.
It took Smith an extraordinary 15 months and at least 15 drafts to knock Helen's statement into shape.
In court, he blamed the sluggish bureaucracy of the "Third World-type country that Greece is" for much of that delay, saying he'd needed Greek co-operation before taking a formal statement from Helen, now living in Greece with her parents.
But there had been other hiccups, too. Six months into his investigation, Smith emailed Helen about a problem with dates he'd found in her statement.
Helen - in English scandalously bad for a teacher with two degrees - had first written that Theophanous raped her in June or July 2000, before she settled on "October off (sic) 1998".
Smith now concluded the true "offence date is 10 September, 1998", and "we need to fix that for a start on any documents that have been made".
Another hitch: Helen had claimed that on the night of the rape she'd twice rung a girlfriend, call her Girlfriend A, and told her what had happened. In fact, Smith told her, the number she'd rung was that of a former boyfriend. Better change that, too.
On it went. Could Helen say why she'd been found guilty in 1994 of making a false statement in claiming social security? Could she say why she'd wrongly accused a former boss and principal of "sexual harassment"?
Mere mistakes, Helen replied, and that plainly satisfied Smith, who seemed to hear no alarm bells clanging.
Rather, he wrote back, "I believe everything you say", and when asked in court to explain this trustfulness, he said: "It's incumbent on us to believe what complainants tell us ... It's a matter of support. They're vulnerable."
In return, Helen called Smith "my lifeline", and in this way did they work on her statement, back and forth.
In just one 12-month period alone, they spent more than 22 documented hours on the phone, with virtually no conversation recorded.
Then there were the many SMS messages, again with none kept as evidence. And the emails.
All this might be fine in a case that was strong. But Helen's claims were already falling to bits in Smith's fingers.
Helen had said she had two friends in particular who'd back her story, since she'd rung both in the hours after the rape and told them of her ordeal.
But when Smith, nearly 18 months into his investigation, contacted these crucial witnesses, both swore she'd told them no such thing. In court, they were even more damning.
Friend A said the only thing she'd ever heard from Helen about any such incident was a flippant comment about the couch in Theophanous's office, leading her to think that if anything happened, it had been consensual.
But in 2006 she'd got a "very strange" call from Helen warning she might soon see something political in the media that could be worth lots of money.
Soon afterwards she was called by Burdon-Smith, the first to tell her Helen was claiming to have been raped.
When she said she knew nothing of this, Helen sent her an "awful and intimidating email", followed by a backdated letter in which she invented conversations they'd supposedly had, to make it seem Friend A had known about the rape all along.
Friend B likewise denied Helen, once her best friend, had ever told her of any rape in the three calls they'd had on the night. What's more, she said emails that Helen produced, claiming they were from her and proved she'd known of the rape all along, were in fact forgeries.
Her husband, an IT professional (described by Smith as "a typical Greek"), said the emails, which had been shuffled between Helen's various email accounts, did not have the header information they'd normally carry if they were from his wife, and also contained "words she doesn't use".
OTHER former friends and police also told the court Helen was not to be trusted.
One called her "dishonest", saying she believed Helen had been sacked by the Education Department for stealing.
She said that when Helen last year asked her to testify against Theophanous, claiming "you know what happened", she had no idea what she meant. In fact, four years after the alleged rape Helen had told her she'd asked Theophanous to help her get compensation for unfair dismissal. Odd help to seek from your rapist.
Yet another friend told the police Helen had apparently confided intimate details to Theophanous about a relationship she had with another man six months after her alleged rape.
Again: "I cannot understand any context in which you would reveal anything that personal to a man who raped you," she told police in an email.
And as if all that wasn't enough to shake your confidence in Helen, a man who'd been seeing her around the time of the alleged rape said she'd boasted that a married man in Parliament had "attempted to seduce her".
She'd seemed "quite pleased about it", but had "declined" the offer.
The boyfriend said he'd broken off with Helen after she became abusive, and was shocked when he now learned Helen had just told the court that she, instead, had dropped him after catching him masturbating over child porn. She was a fantasist, he agreed.
A second boyfriend told the court his own friendship with Helen had lasted until around 2004, when his wife found raunchy SMS texts she'd sent him. It's actually this fraught relationship that Helen cited in counselling sessions in Brunswick and Melbourne University as the cause of her emotional distress - a distress she now claims was caused by her alleged rape, years earlier.
With so many of Helen's friends denouncing her, Smith must have been relieved to hear at last from one who finally said she could confirm the rape truly occurred.
Friend C had written to Burdon-Smith to say Helen had called her at her Brunswick home on the night of the rape, in 2000, crying "He ... he ... he hurt me ... He raped me."
SHE said Helen told her she was ringing from a pay phone because her phone was flat - which explained away why police could later find no record of any such call.
But, alas, the line then went dead: "The phone cut off and she didn't have any more coins."
As you may see, this evidence had big holes. First, Helen was now claiming the rape had occurred in 1998, not 2000 (when Friend C was overseas, anyway). Second, local calls from phone boxes don't time out.
By now you may well conclude, as did the magistrate, that this evidence was "concocted", and you might well ask why police thought the investigation was worth a minute more of their time.
Yet on Christmas Eve of 2008, Smith, with the approval of the Director of Public Prosecutions, charged Theophanous with rape.
This choice of day seemed vindictive, given the police investigation had already meandered for nearly two years.
It was the final insult in a process that had treated Theophanous as guilty from the start -- a process, as the magistrate put it, that was marked by a "benign acceptance of (Helen's) complaint without any objectivity".
Indeed, at every stage it seemed Theophanous was there just to be buried. The Age, for instance, allowed a journalist to write a front-page denunciation of this innocent man even before he was charged - and without disclosing she was Helen's friend.
Even the prosecutor at this month's committal hearing referred to Helen as her "client", and Labor's powerbrokers had long before informed journalists that Theophanous was now finished.
Except, of course, he's innocent, after all. A small detail perhaps, but please God that such things still matter. |
