STANDING AGAINST MINDLESS MOBS

IHAVE been thinking of two Labor people I defended from the mob when they were accused of rape.

Of course, their mobs weren’t like the ones now jeering Cardinal George Pell, convicted of what a County Court jury ruled was the sexual assault of two 13year-old boys at once, in an open room in a busy cathedral, straight after a Mass.

One man I defended was Opposition Leader Bill Shorten, when a woman accused the Labor leader of having raped her at a Young Labor camp in 1986.

The allegations were clearly so damaging that Shorten would have had to stand down or quit if the public knew of them.

They were also so old and apparently uncorroborated that I thought the truth might never be known, or correctly remembered.

That’s not to call the accuser a liar. But memories over time can be unreliable. A trauma can be misremembered, or misattributed to someone else.

So I refused all comment on the allegation until police, wisely, concluded that Shorten had no case to answer. I did this despite opposing Shorten politically.

I wasn’t alone. There was a total media silence, which Pell never got. Nor were there screams about always believing the victim.

There was another case that some media outlets would rather forget.

Theo Theophanous was a capable minister in Victoria’s Brumby Labor government — until The Age in 2008 published a front-page “exclusive interview” with a woman who claimed he’d raped her a decade earlier. Four days later, the Sunday

Age smeared him as a violent, lecherous, light-fingered and treacherous shonk, who’d use moral blackmail to silence his alleged victim.

Labor instantly treated him as a leper. He was forced to step down, and a year later, career shredded, quit parliament.

Yet in 2009 a court ruled that “the prosecution case is not sustainable on the evidence at any level”, even after police had the woman rewrite her complaint against Theophanous 15 times, often to “correct” what was plainly false.

One draft changed the date of the alleged rape from June or July of 2000 to October of 1998. Another changed the place.

Asked in court why he’d been so credulous, a detective replied: “It’s incumbent on us to believe what complainants tell us … ”

Again, the magistrate here wasn’t calling the woman a liar. He said he was sure she believed her story.

But the evidence. Evidence.