Porter denies rape claims

AUSTRALIA’S chief law officer has categorically denied raping a 16-year-old girl in 1988, saying the allegation that has thrown the government into turmoil “simply did not happen”.

Attorney-General Christian Porter tearfully revealed he was the accused minister in a press conference on Wednesday, speaking out on what he said was “the most wild, intense and unrestrained series of accusations that I can remember in modern Australian politics”.

He declared he never slept with the woman, who was a teammate on the Australian school debating team, after her friends circulated the detailed rape allegation in a letter that was sent to Scott Morrison and other federal MPs last week.

The woman died in Adelaide in the middle of last year, forcing NSW Police to suspend their investigation before she had made a formal statement, and the force declared on Tuesday that the case was closed.

After Mr Porter’s statement, South Australian Coroner David Whittle confirmed he was still seeking information from police about the woman’s death, and left open the possibility of holding a full inquest.

The Attorney-General — who has received the support of the Prime Minister — said he would not step aside but that he would take several weeks of leave to “assess and hopefully improve my own mental health”.

While Labor leader Anthony Albanese has pushed for an independent probe of the alleged rape, Mr Porter said he did not know “what it would achieve” because he would be asked to “disprove something that didn’t happen 33 years ago”.

“If I stand down from my position as Attorney-General because of an allegation about something that simply did not happen — then any person in Australia can lose their career, their job, their life’s work based on nothing more than an accusation that appears in print,” he said.

Mr Porter said he knew the alleged victim “for the briefest periods” when they were teenagers, and remembered her as an “intelligent, bright, happy person”.

He said her parents had “suffered a terrible loss” and “did not deserve the frenzied politicisation of the circumstances of your daughter’s death in the past week”.

Responding to questions about his relationship with the woman, Mr Porter said they “did what normal teenagers would do”.

He said the woman taught him to iron a shirt, and conceded it was “not impossible” that he had told her she would make “a wonderful wife” one day.

But Mr Porter said he had “never been in the person’s room or anything like that”.