“Julian should never have been indicted.” – Jen Robinson
In the years that followed, people would seek her out to ask advice on making the terrifying move. “I became the poster girl for quitting your PhD.”
She worked with Geoffrey on important and interesting cases.
“He rang me one day and said, ‘I want to make the case that the extent of child sex abuse in the Catholic Church is a crime against humanity and the Pope’s personally responsible and should be prosecuted for it.’”
Geoffrey subsequently wrote a book, The Case of the Pope, which argued that Pope Benedict XVI, who oversaw the Vatican judicial system for 25 years as a cardinal, should be held to account for clerical child sex abuse around the world. Knowing her family was Catholic – Terry Robinson’s horse racing colours are pale blue and white “for the Virgin Mary”, Jen explains – Geoffrey asked Jennifer how she would feel about doing the research. She was all for it. She is not a practising Catholic.
Geoffrey also introduced her to London society. Jennifer recalls dinner parties at his house with his then wife, ebullient novelist Kathy Lette: “I walk in and Dannii Minogue and I are the first two guests. And then Kathy and Geoffrey come home, and Salman Rushdie walks in … and then Stephen Fry. So I’m sitting there – can you imagine? I always joke that Kathy’s house is the alternative Australian embassy.” Kathy became one of Jen’s dearest friends. “I absolutely adore her,” she says.
Jennifer is generous with her time when it comes to friends and clients. The calibre of her work, particularly high-profile cases, attracted media attention. The UK paper The Mail dubbed her “The A-list’s go-to lawyer”. There’s a photo of her, smiling, in a black dress next to Bill Murray as they head to George Clooney and Amal Alamuddin’s wedding in Venice. (Jennifer and Amal worked together at Doughty Street Chambers.) Her Instagram includes photos of her at Royal Albert Hall hip-to-hip with Kylie Minogue. But the glossy side is just one small facet of her life. There are no cameras on her when she is fighting for West Papuan Independence or being frisked and fingerprinted at Belmarsh
Prison during her visits to
Assange.
Legal eagle
In 2010, publications around the world including The New York Times, El Pais in Spain and Le Monde in France ran simultaneous articles based on details of US diplomatic cables that included a tranche of heretofore secret information published by WikiLeaks, overseen by founder and editor Julian Assange.
Following the leaks, Assange would be recognised with press freedom awards and hounded by US authorities seeking to extradite him to stand trial for espionage. From the start, Jennifer has been by his side. “Julian should never have been indicted,” she says. “An Australian journalist is in a
British prison, potentially being sent to prison for 175 years for the very publication for which he won the Walkley Award for most outstanding contribution to journalism and the Sydney Peace Prize … what that says about our democracy is appalling.”
She has received death threats and was subject to intimidation for her advocacy of Assange. Yet it wasn’t her most confronting case.
Jennifer found herself under a harsher media glare in 2020 when she represented Amber Heard in the defamation suit between Johnny Depp and The Sun newspaper. Heard’s testimony was key to The Sun establishing a defence of truth, which the court accepted. Heard didn’t initiate the legal action, yet she and Jennifer were subjected to a maelstrom of hatred and abuse.
“I had Catholic protesters outside my house when we were doing that work on the Pope, with banners and shouting abuse. On WikiLeaks I’ve had death threats from current and former military officers – or at least that’s how they’d describe themselves when they’d send the death threats … And I thought ‘What could possibly be worse than that?’ Who would have thought it would be an issue about domestic violence?”
She attributes the shocking trolling to a combination of factors. “It was partly celebrity, partly this backlash around #MeToo, partly this men’s rights, right-wing incel movement pushing back on progress that’s been made that all came together.
“We’re already learning that some of the right-wing media organisations were putting money into funding pro-Johnny content around the trial. And so I think it was a coming together of things that created this tinder box or this explosion of online discussion and reaction. It’s like everybody had a view or had an opinion about it.”
Amber Heard swill forever cherish Jennifer’s friendship.
“Her brilliance and sheer fortitude helped me survive a deeply painful ordeal that I would not have been able to weather without her,” Amber says.
Jen was in this firestorm because, in addition to being a human rights lawyer, she is also a media law expert. The two specialties go hand-in-hand. “Free speech is a human right,” Jennifer says. “International human rights law is and should inform – and does inform a lot of the litigation we see in media law space domestically.”
The WikiLeaks matter exemplifies this. At the time of writing, the UK High Court had yet to rule on Assange’s appeal against extradition. For supporters and loved ones, it’s an agonising wait.
Whenever Jennifer visits Assange, he asks about home. “To me it’s just heartbreaking... He’ll say ‘Jen, how was home? Tell me about Australia’. And it breaks my heart,” she says. “He says to me, ‘Jen, they’re stealing my life’. And he’s right.”
Jen’s readiness to speak up for those who speak out is a theme that has run through her career.
“Those are the cases where defending free speech is most important: When it’s most controversial,” she says. “Because it’s easier to defend views that you can stand by, that suit your own view of the world. But I take a really strong view that we have to defend the speech that’s most controversial because … that’s where we stand to lose. To lose ground. And as soon as you start to lose ground, then we’re all at risk.”