Servicewoman reveals Air Force sex attacks
She was locked in a cage and assaulted. Now the Defence Force and predator officer are seeking $200k in legal costs. By Alison Mau and Kirsty Lawrence.
An Air Force servicewoman has waived court-imposed anonymity to tell of her terrifying sex attack ordeal at the hands of an officer.
However, she is paying the price: she is asking for public help as the NZ Defence Force and her attacker demand a $200,000 legal costs guarantee before she can take her case to the Court of Appeal.
As ‘‘M’’, the woman gave evidence in the High Court this year. As Mariya Taylor, she speaks out in the Sunday Star-Times today about her dismay that convicted sex predator Robert Roper is demanding $57,000 in legal costs from her. She has even given the court a lien over her family home to ensure she can cover the costs.
This comes as Official Information Act requests reveal the number of military personnel investigated for criminal sexual offending is high – and rising. During the first four months of this year alone, the Defence Force received 32 reports of offences. That’s an increase on the 25 incidents investigated in 2016, and 31 last year. It acknowledges the real figures are likely to be far higher.
Lieutenant-Colonel Karl Cummins, who leads the Defence Force’s Respect operation to crack down on sexual harassment, said any behaviour or action that gave rise to a wellfounded allegation was investigated – but things still needed to improve.
The Defence Force would not say whether it would continue to pursue Mariya Taylor for costs.
However, Cummins said there was progress: 12,000 personnel had completed sexual ethics and relations workshops and recruits were in less danger of harassment than when Taylor served: ‘‘I don’t have daughters but I’ve got two sons. Would I be confident of my children joining this organisation? Yes I would, because I know the efforts . . . this organisation is going to,’’ he said. ‘‘We put our hand up, we said we’ve got a problem with this, we said we’re going to work to solve it.’’
Defence Minister Ron Mark warned the military he would be following progress. He expected more offences to be reported because of growing awareness. ‘‘What is important is that these incidents do actually reduce and that the NZDF becomes a safer place,’’ he told the Star-Times.
The latest victim to come forward, 51-year-old Mariya Taylor, suffered three years of sexual harassment by Air Force Sergeant Robert Roper when she was based at the Whenuapai base during the 1980s. The attacks, in which she was locked in a cage, eventually drove her from the armed services, and from New Zealand.
After initially making a police complaint Taylor decided to sue the Defence Force and Roper for compensation.
This year, High Court Justice Rebecca Edwards found the claims of abuse and harassment by Roper were proven, but Taylor had left it too late to file her case. Now, Taylor is headed to the Court of Appeal – and friends have set up a Givealittle crowdfunding page to help with her mounting legal costs. If she loses, she could be liable for more than $200,000 – including $57,000 costs to Roper, who is serving a 13-year prison sentence for raping his daughters and three other girls on the Air Force base.
She found it hard to believe Defence Force claims that they had changed. ‘‘They’ve fought me tooth and nail for the last four years,’’ she said. ‘‘I haven’t even received an apology from them.’’
‘Power made him fearless’
Sergeant Robert Roper. His conviction is one of New Zealand’s most defining disclosures of sexual harassment and assault of the past decade. And now, a new front is being opened in the battle for military accountability.
On one side, the notorious child rapist and his employer, the NZ Defence Force. On the other, a woman whose life has been indelibly marked by her experiences as an 18-year-old recruit.
In the High Court this year, the woman – known only as M – asked her former employer for compensation for allowing Roper to subject her to three years of abuse.
In return, the NZ Defence Force spent more than $600,000 to make sure she walked out of court without a cent.
Until now, M’s identity was shrouded by the statutory name suppression given to all complainants in cases of sexual violence. Shrugging that off and stepping into the light of public scrutiny is not an easy process – you need a court order to do so. Today, M has done that, unmasking herself so that she might keep on with the battle.
Her name is Mariya Taylor, and she did not expect to have to talk to media, to have her image broadcast. But after losing her case on a point of law this year, Taylor says she has no choice.
When the #MeToo movement emerged, there was talk that women would come forward with baseless stories of harassment, for a shot at fame. This idea seems ludicrous as I sit opposite Taylor at the house she shares with her partner and their teenaged son. She does not want the attention. Her fear of telling her story in public is palpable. My questions bring her to tears. This is no moment of glory – it is a moment of terror.
It’s unusually warm for this time of year on the Sunshine Coast, but we sit outside anyway, in the lush tropical garden Taylor has built from nothing since she and her family moved here. The garden is her sanctuary; tending it allows her to push thoughts of Robert Roper from her mind.
It was Mariya Taylor’s green thumb that brought her to the Air Force in the first place. In the mid-1980s, she was working in horticulture near Whenuapai, and knew many young people at the base. She was young and fit; the career path was attractive. In 1985 Taylor joined up and completed her basic training. Pictures from the early part of her three years’ service show a smiling young airwoman, not yet out of her teens. ‘‘I was 18 years old and very naive.’’ Initially, life in the Air Force was a joy. ‘‘I loved it, I absolutely loved it’’, says Taylor of her first posting, as a motor transport driver.
Her Sergeant, though, was Robert Roper. Taylor describes Roper as ‘‘another level altogether’’, someone she had an intense fear of. ‘‘I had just come off the recruit course and we were taught we were always to do what our superiors told us to do. We were taught to always follow orders.’’
Taylor says Roper’s behaviour towards female underlings at the base was well known. He would pull bra straps, pinch bottoms, push open the door of the change rooms while they were dressing. His
actions took place out in the open, for all to see.
‘‘In the early afternoon the senior NCOs (noncommissioned officers) would leave our section and and they would go down to the Sergeants’ mess and they would drink all afternoon.
‘‘Early evening, the Section would get a phone call and he (Roper) would specifically ask for a lift home from me. The minute the car started he would lock the car doors and start abusing me.’’
Taylor has had to detail what happened in the High Court, with her identity protected, but speaking publicly is still difficult. ‘‘He would put his hand up my skirt, he would be groping my breasts, groping my inner thighs’’, she says.
‘‘When I would reach for the RT to call for help, he would squeeze my arm so hard. When I arrived at his house he would put his hand on me and squeeze my upper arm tightly, and tell me that . . . if I said anything, he would ruin my career.
‘‘When I got back to base I would be crying and hysterical and often the boys in the section would offer to drive instead of me, to protect me.’’
Roper seemed to have a particular wish to bully and intimidate her in increasingly bizarre ways. On several occasions, Taylor says she was locked inside a wire-mesh storage area in the transport division tyre bay. Roper would rub himself against her, and poke her on the buttocks with a tyre iron.
While inspecting troops during transport division parades, he would leer at her. Taylor was terrified. ‘‘I felt intimidated and degraded. He had total control of me in these situations. This power made him fearless, and excited him. It still makes me shiver from head to toe. I can still hear him and smell his strong aftershave as if it was yesterday.’’
Despite her fear, Taylor says she did complain, several times, including to her superior at a performance review. Each time, Roper retorted that Taylor was ‘‘lippy and opinionated’’. Taylor still wonders why her superiors turned a blind eye.
It’s an unusual thing for a victim of sexual assault to ask for their statutory name suppression to be lifted. The case of Robert Roper is unusual in the extreme, therefore: Mariya Taylor is the fourth victim to ask the court.
The first three were Roper’s daughters Karina Andrews and Tracey Thompson, and their friend Cherie Ham. It was the news of Roper’s conviction that galvanised Taylor. ‘‘I felt absolutely sick. I felt angry that I had never been heard as a young airwoman and I felt guilty . . .. if I had been heard, those children would have had a better life.’’
Taylor made a police complaint,and then decided to sue the Defence Force and Roper.
Her lawyer, Geraldine Whiteford, says the trial was a ‘‘massive ordeal’’. ‘‘She sat with her back to Roper but there was always a lot of clanking and noise when he came in, and when she heard him she would start to cry. It was miserable for her.’’
In defending Taylor’s claim, the Defence Force denied knowledge of a pattern of systematic inappropriate behaviour by Roper, and said there was no evidence Taylor had suffered trauma.
High Court Justice Rebecca Edwards found Roper groped Taylor as she drove him home and locked her in the tyre cage on more than one occasion. Taylor’s claims that Roper rubbed himself against airwomen, pulled on bra straps and ogled her on parade were corroborated, too.
However, Taylor’s claim that she had complained to her superiors was ‘‘undermined by the lack of any documentary record’’. The judge discounted an airman’s evidence that his formal complaint was ‘‘screwed up and thrown in the bin’’ in front of him. In the end, Justice Edwards found that Taylor’s claim was barred by the Limitation Act, requiring a claim to be filed within six years.
So now, Taylor is headed to the Court of Appeal.
It goes almost without saying that legal action of this kind takes a huge financial, as well as emotional, toll. Taylor and her family can’t pay the kinds of costs the Defence Force and Robert Roper are demanding. She already fears they will lose their home, having staked it as security.
An appeal is her only hope. ‘‘It’s really hard to ask for help, but it’s just that this is an amount of money I can’t come up with myself. We’ve spent so much money getting to where we are.’’
Taylor can justifiably feel overwhelmed at cost demands topping $200,000. But it is the $57,000 being claimed by her tormentor Robert Roper, that horrifies her most. ‘‘He ruined my life. He ruined my career, and I guess now he wants $50,000 for the pleasure of it all. I just don’t see where justice prevails in that situation.’’
I would be crying and hysterical and often the boys in the section would offer to drive instead of me, to protect me.
Mariya Taylor