'She was a very credible person,' says friend of woman who claims minister raped her in 1988
Jeremy Samuel says he met the woman who has alleged she was raped by a cabinet minister in January 1988 during that same year.
“I was her friend,” Samuel told Guardian Australia on Monday. “I just want to say that my friend was an incredibly smart, witty, talented and capable person.”
Samuel and the woman met in Brisbane when they were high-achieving teenagers with shared interests, and kept in touch for three decades. He said she first revealed the historical rape allegation to him in June 2019, a year before her death. “Not just her death but a lot of events of her life were tragically sad,” he said.
June 2019 seems to have been a tipping point for the woman, who started confiding in a number of old friends around that time. Guardian Australia has spoken to a number of associates who recount similar stories of a woman processing a trauma.
“She clearly was extremely distressed, she was obsessed about these events,” Samuel said. “I think she said the George Pell case had brought some of it to the fore for her, and she went back through old diaries.”
“I knew she’d reported [the assault] in New South Wales [to the police] and she felt she’d been given a very good hearing,” he said.
Asked if he believed the woman’s allegations when she confided in him, Samuel said this: “I believe that she absolutely believed the truth of what she said. Everything she said was coherent and congruous.
“She never contradicted herself. She never changed facts or anything. She was a very credible person. She had some mental health challenges but she was not psychotic, she was angry and hurt.
“She was very lucid and very cogent. I’m being a bit nuanced – do I know if it is actually true? I wasn’t there.
“But is she credible, was she lucid, did she want this to be made public? Yes, yes and yes. Does it ring true? Absolutely. I never once got the sense she was talking out of delusion.”
Scott Morrison told reporters on Monday he had spoken to the minister about the allegations. Morrison said the minister “vigorously” rejects the woman’s claims. The prime minister said investigating the allegations is a “matter for the police”.
The claim was put to the prime minister in a letter sent to him last week from friends in whom she had confided. That letter was also sent to the Labor senator Penny Wong and the Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young.
Guardian Australia has seen a copy of that letter, and a copy of a separate statement from the woman prepared for police. The statement sent to Morrison includes a detailed account of events, and it references diary entires from the years following the alleged assault. The statement is an abridged version of a longer statement that Guardian Australia has not seen.
The woman’s statement says she first met the man who went on to serve as a cabinet minister in 1986. They met again the following year. The alleged assault is said to have occurred in January 1988 in Sydney, when both were teenagers.
Recounting the events leading up to the alleged assault, the woman says she ironed a shirt for the now cabinet minister in preparation for an event. He is alleged to have said to her that she “would make someone a wonderful wife one day” because she was “so smart and so pretty” and could do the “good housewife things”. According to the statement, the young man is said to have flagged interest in a career in politics, and an aspiration to be prime minister.
The statement also suggests the young man had made lewd comments about her body prior to the incident, including a negative reference about the size of her breasts.
The woman says she agreed to a non-penetrative sexual act at the man’s request after an evening out in Sydney before alleging that the now minister sexually assaulted her more than once later that evening. The details recounted in the woman’s statement are graphic.
The woman says in her statement that she was very drunk when she was assaulted, and felt “dizzy”.
She says the man helped her clean up afterwards, including washing her body and her hair. She says she was “deeply shocked and ashamed” in the aftermath, and told nobody about what had happened.
Samuel said the incident “was a very, very heavy weight on her. I’m incredibly sad for her on so many levels”.
He said in the year between first recounting her allegations to him, and the woman’s death, “she was really starting to want to talk about this, and figure out how to get some peace, if not justice”.
He said she reached out to a group of her oldest friends – and Guardian Australia has confirmed she made contact with a number of people in the social circle of her teens at around the same time – because “she wanted people … to support her and validate her recollections”.
The woman moved in high-powered circles, and Samuel said “an extraordinary group of people coalesced around her”.
The historical allegations became public on Friday after Wong and Hanson-Young announced they had received correspondence outlining the historical complaint and had forwarded it to the Australian federal police. The allegations were reported first by the ABC.
Before her death, Samuel said the woman told him she had written to Malcolm and Lucy Turnbull “and she’d bumped into Penny Wong, and she’d shared things with them, and their advice was go to the police”.
The woman spoke to New South
Wales police about her allegations in February 2020 and a taskforce was established to investigate, although a formal interview with police was delayed by the pandemic. Just before her death, the woman withdrew her complaint.
The lawyer who represented the woman before her death wants an independent inquiry. He argues the current situation is “untenable” because “at the moment there are 16 [cabinet ministers] who have a cloud over them, and that cannot continue”.
“There’s really no alternative here but for the minister to step forward, identify himself and step down, and for an external, independent inquiry of some form to be put in place to investigate,” Michael Bradley, a partner at Marque Lawyers, told Guardian Australia on Monday.
Bradley said “some kind of judicial inquiry” was required. The inquiry needed “proper powers” in order “to afford full procedural fairness to everyone, particularly the accused man”.