Pod Insights True Crime Conversations Part 2: Nina Funnell Has A New Fight. This One Will Shock You About this episode This is Part 2 of Nina Funnell’s story. You can listen to Part 1 here. https://www.mamamia.com.au/podcasts/true-crime-conversations/part-1-nina-funnell-has-a-new-fight-this-one-will-shock-you/
Nina Funnell survived a violent assault as a young woman, fighting off her attacker and escaping to call the police. Although he was never found, the experience became a turning point.
Within weeks, she chose to speak publicly, challenging stigma, victim-blaming, and the silence surrounding violence against women. Since then, Nina has become a leading advocate and journalist, driving national conversations and legal reform.
Through campaigns like Let Her Speak and Justice Shouldn’t Hurt, she has helped change laws, amplify survivor voices, and secure millions in funding for victim support services.
Today, she joins us to discuss her work supporting victim-survivors and their families, and the fight for a more just system.
LINKS
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CREDITS
Guest: Nina Funnell
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0533976/Host: Gemma Bath https://www.linkedin.com/in/gemmabath/?originalSubdomain=au
Senior Producer: Tahli Blackman https://www.linkedin.com/in/tahli-blackman-205a891b7/?originalSubdomain=au
Group Executive Producer: Ilaria Brophy
Video Editor: Julian Rosario
Audio Engineer: Jacob Round
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Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 This is part two of my conversation with Nina Funnell. Before you listen to this, make sure you've listened to part one. There's a link in our show notes. Before you listen today, this episode contains stories of child sexual abuse, sexual assault and suicide. I want to move on to another huge campaign that you worked on. The Let Her Speak, which turned into the Let Us Speak campaign. Where did that start for you?
0:26 Speaker 01 Okay, so interestingly, that actually also started in that year of university reporting.
0:30 Speaker 00 Did it?
0:30 Speaker 01 Yeah, so back in 2016, 17, when I was doing all of that work, I got a phone call from the student women's offices at the University of Tasmania to tell me that there was a convicted sex offender living on campus in one of the residential colleges. I think it was John Flynn Residential College. And he was an elderly convicted child sex offender and his name's Nicholas Bester. And he was living in coed facilities and he was making a number of the students on campus feel very, very uncomfortable. And they didn't understand why he was living alongside 17 and 18 year old girls. And I mean, they had shared bathroom facilities as well. And he was, I think, a 68 year old man at the time.
1:13 Speaker 01 Anyway, I said, yeah, I'll do that story as part of the 52. And then I said, but I just want to check, how do his original victims, because he'd been to jail? I said, how do, how do, do you know who that is? Do you know how they feel about this? Do you know if they feel comfortable with the story coming out? And they said, yes, her name's Grace Tame. She lives in LA. And I said, okay, well, I'd like to check in with her first about how she feels about me reporting on him living at college and also if she'd like to say anything.
1:42 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:42 Speaker 01 And I made contact with Grace, who he had abused as a 15 year old schoolgirl when he was her maths teacher at St Michael's Collegiate Girl School in Hobart. And Grace said that, yes, absolutely. She was happy for the story to go ahead. And actually, her mum, Penny, was a mature age student on campus at the time and had been running into her daughter's offender, so you can imagine. So that was impacting her right to access education. So Grace also said that she would like to be quoted in the article. And so, you know, I wrote up this piece and as with every article, we run it past our legal department first before we publish it. And my lawyer Gina McWilliams came back and she said, the piece is good to go,
2:25 Speaker 01 but you can't name Grace. And I was like, why? The offender's been convicted. He's gone to jail. There's no defamation. There's no sub judice or contempt issues, you know, the normal stuff we come up against. And she said, well, there's a thing called section 194 K of the Evidence Act in Tasmania, which prohibits survivors from being identified unless they go to court and get a court order. And I remember going, well, can we do that? Can we get her a court order if she wants to be named? And Gina was like, look, if she wants to be named that badly, we can do it. But you know, it's, it's a bit of work. And I went away and I thought about it. And I was like, so wait, every survivor in that state who wants to tell their story has to go to court or has to get the media organisation to go to court first before they can tell their story. That doesn't
3:10 Speaker 01 seem right. And Grace was 22 at the time, and I'd gone public when I was 23. And it suddenly occurred to me that had my assault happened in Hobart instead of Sydney, I wouldn't have been able to tell my story. I would have had to, or I would have at least had to go to court, get a court order. And that's, that can be, you know, up to $10,000.
3:32 Speaker 00 I was gonna say, it's a lot of money.
3:33 Speaker 01 Yeah. So we did Grace's work. We, I went to Grace and I said, how would you feel about us doing, getting you a court order? We'll cover the cost. So we did the work and Gina did it. And it, it cost about, I think it was about $9,200 to do it. Now, if the individual survivor was expected to wear the cost of that, that's outrageous. But more than that, I started to go, well, this, this is really problematic because it means that the media get to pick and choose which survivors end up telling their story based on where the, you know, and it also means that commercial media, media with big, deep pockets are the ones that are going to be able to tell these stories. What happens if a survivor doesn't want to tell their story to mainstream media and they just want to tell it through their own blog or through an autobiography? Does that mean that they then wear the cost? And even more than that,
4:17 Speaker 01 I was realising, this actually reinscribes the victim survivor back into the criminal justice system, which was often very traumatic to begin with. And it puts them in this position where they have to ask a judge for permission to say their own name. Like, it's so paternalistic.
4:34 Speaker 00 It's also making them feel shame when there is no shame. There.
4:38 Speaker 01 A hundred percent. And also, the offender, the offender doesn't need a court order to tell what they want to say. And Nicholas Besta, the offender, had actually gone and done a 17 minute interview with a woman called Bettina Arndt, where they had actually mocked Grace and made light of the offending. So I ended up speaking to my editors at the time and saying, I think this is more than a story. I actually think we should campaign on this. And they said, all right, go away and put together a pitch. And so that was an interesting process in and of itself, because I remember thinking, like, you know, I'm writing for a national outlet. I'm trying to draw attention to a law that frankly, no one in Tasmania even seems to think is that much of a problem. No one was calling it a gag law at the time. They were
5:21 Speaker 01 just calling it. In fact, the local sexual assault service in Tasmania thought it was a good thing that survivors had to go to court and ask for permission, because they thought that that would stop exploitative journalism by adding in an extra step. It was bizarre.
5:33 Speaker 00 But they asked survivors about that?
5:34 Speaker 01 Yeah, good, good. Yeah, very good question. So I was like, how do I design a campaign? My one and only case study is living in LA and can't be named or photographed. So it's very hard to humanize the issue when you can't name and photograph people.
5:50 Speaker 01 I'm writing about the smallest state, which people around the country don't necessarily click on articles about. How do I make this national news? And how do I get people to care about it? And so the answer to that was, the first thing that we decided to do was to call it a gag law. It immediately kind of constructs what the problem is.
6:08 Speaker 00 Yeah.
6:09 Speaker 01 The second thing was, I decided that I would interview victim survivors from every other state that didn't have gag laws, who had already gone public, to ask them why that had been important for them to be able to tell their story on their own terms. So I photographed, and I got them all to hold a sign that said, let her speak. So that became the name of the campaign, hashtag let her speak. So people like Saxon Mullins, Tara Moss, and I, In the end, I interviewed 14 survivors from around the whole country who had gone public to ask them, you know, why, why was that important for them? And because I'd been doing all this work with university survivors, a number of those 14 were themselves university from universities. So the campaign actually really was born out of those series of events.
6:54 Speaker 01 And when we launched on day one, I partnered with 60 Minutes. We did it as this big sort of news.com.au slash 60 Minutes launch to say there is this absurd law in Tasmania. Here are all these survivors around the country calling out Tasmania. And so that makes it national.
7:11 Speaker 00 Makes it national, makes everyone else care.
7:13 Speaker 01 And it also means that you've got faces, you've got other survivors.
7:16 Speaker 00 Yeah.
7:17 Speaker 01 And then it becomes a survivor led campaign. And I decided to also include my own name and story in that as well as a survivor to say, you know, at 23, telling my own story had actually been really important for me because it was how I reclaimed some of my agency in a moment when I felt very powerless. And so I sort of reinserted myself as both a journalist and victim survivor. And obviously, we got Grace's court order for her and she was able to tell her story. But I knew that once we told her story with her face, I would get inundated with other victim survivors from Tasmania who would realise, oh my gosh, like, most, most survivors in Tasmania didn't even realise that there was this requirement that they go to court if they want to tell their story.
7:59 Speaker 00 Hmm.
7:59 Speaker 01 So suddenly I get these other survivors coming forward saying, hey, could you get me a court order? Could you get me a court order? And knowing that that's going to be about $10,000 each time.
8:07 Speaker 00 Can't do that.
8:08 Speaker 01 Well, no, we actually decided we should do that. So.
8:10 Speaker 00 Really? The media company decided they could do 10,000 every time?
8:13 Speaker 01 No, I decided we should do it. So, so I decided to set up a GoFundMe and to partner with two organisations, End Rope on Campus Australia, because this was.
8:25 Speaker 01 This was born out of university student activism and also Mark Lawyers, who are a brilliant law firm here in Sydney. And Mark Lawyers said that they would do all the legal work pro bono. And so the the GoFundMe would cover the costs of, so it costs about, I think it was about $2,000 per application or something to like pay for some of the court fees and so on. We ended up doing it over 20 times, getting these court orders. And every time we'd get a court order, I would then tell the story of the victim survivor who wanted to go public. And now it turned out, it wasn't just Tasmania that had this that law. It was also the Northern Territory. So I was doing, I was running the Let Her Speak campaign in both Tasmania and the NT, the idea being that we would go to court, get these court orders
9:07 Speaker 01 so that survivors could tell their story. I would then do their story. And as part of that story, I would once again highlight the fact that, oh, by the way, we had to go to court to do this. That's not sustainable. We need legal change. And so we were pressuring the, so the campaign was pressuring the attorney generals in both jurisdictions to say, change the legislation. And in, it was April 2020 that the Tasmanian law changed. And in July 2020, that the Northern Territory law changed. So survivors in those two jurisdictions now are able to, to tell their stories under their own names without having to go to court. And, and I do want to shout out to the other survivors, because obviously Grace was named Australian of the Year for her bravery in telling her story as an adult survivor of child sexual abuse.
9:51 Speaker 00 Yeah.
9:51 Speaker 01 But there were multiple other survivors in the campaign who did the same thing of going to court, getting a court order. So like Tamika, Janelle, Lavinia in particular, like up in the NT, Sandra, they all did an amazing job. And I want to give credit to all of the survivors in the campaign that did that.
10:09 Speaker 00 Such an amazing effort that you were able to
10:13 Speaker 00 get those laws changed. What was that campaign like for you? It sounds exhausting.
10:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, like, the worst part was the week that I got notification that the The Tasmanian law was going to change. I also got notification that Victoria had just introduced a gag law, the exact gag law that we'd just gotten changed in Tasmania. And it went one step further. Not only were victim survivors in Victoria now required to go to court and get court permission to tell their stories, but any women, or anyone, sorry, I should say, who had been the victim of sexual assault and murder, or anyone who was now a deceased victim of sexual assault, could no longer be named. So people like Jill Maher, Eurydice Dixon, Ayama Sawa. Overnight, it became illegal to publish their names, including by their own family members
11:04 Speaker 01 on memorial pages and so on. So when I got that news, and sidebar, I'd also just found out I was pregnant.
11:14 Speaker 00 Information overload.
11:16 Speaker 01 I, I just, my heart sank and I knew, I knew that this was going to be a really different fight in Victoria because Tasmania and the Northern Territory are very small jurisdictions, population wise. And these laws had been on the books forever in Tasmania and the NT. No one was particularly attached to them or wanted to defend them. Whereas in Victoria, the Attorney General Jill Hennessy at the time, had actually just passed and introduced this gag law, which meant that she was going, and her government was going to defend it as a good thing.
11:53 Speaker 00 But why did they think it is a good thing?
11:55 Speaker 01 We now think that what they did was an error in like drafting the legislation, which was so sloppy and so embarrassing for them that they had to double down and defend it. But the other thing that was really different in Victoria, Victoria has a very, very large population of victim survivors who have already been very public and active at that time. So if we think about things like the Royal Commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse, a whole lot of survivors in places like Ballarat had, you know, to do with clergy abuse, had gone public to get that inquiry up in the first place, that Royal Commission up. It's also just, it's a bigger jurisdiction. It's got a more lively and active feminist community. There were lots of survivors who had already exercised their right to go public,
12:41 Speaker 01 who had written autobiographies. Overnight, those autobiographies were in contempt of court because of this new law. So I knew that when I broke that story, it was going to go. Fucking ballistic. And it did. Like it went, it, it, to give you a context, the let her speak petition in Tasmania got a total of like 7,000 signatures. This one, which I didn't even create, some random creator that just copying and pasting my article, got over 200,000 signatures within 24 hours.
13:11 Speaker 00 Wow.
13:11 Speaker 01 Like in Victoria, like it went, it was huge.
13:14 Speaker 00 People were angry.
13:15 Speaker 01 Yeah. And because survivors who had already exercised their right to be public were suddenly being put back in the closet and being told, you now need to shut up and you can't say your name until you go to court and get a court order. And that was really, really distressing and traumatic for them as well as for those survivors who were right on the cusp of wanting to tell their story. And there was one in particular, a woman called Jamie.
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14:14 Speaker 00 And I think Jamie's story is a really good way to explain just how damaging these laws could be. Can you tell us a bit about her story and how these laws affected her?
14:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, absolutely. So Jamie Lee Page, in the same way that Grace Tame was our, I guess, original case study in Tasmania, Jamie Lee Page was our original survivor that we worked with in Victoria, who, and it's a very distressing story, I should warn people. So Jamie and her older sister had been sexually abused by Jamie's biological father and Jamie had been abused from age eight. And when Jamie had disclosed to her older sister what had happened, her older sister Carol went to police and reported her own sexual abuse. And the father then turned around and murdered Carol.
15:04 Speaker 01 The father was then charged and convicted of the murder, but never of any of the sexual offences. The father then served his jail term and was about to be released. And Jamie suddenly realised, Jamie's now an adult, she's a mum, she's got three kids. Jamie realises that this man is going to be released back into the community and no one knows that he's a child sex offender because that's not what he went down for.
15:27 Speaker 00 Hmm.
15:28 Speaker 01 And so Jamie made the very brave decision to, as an adult, to go back to court and to tell her story of what he had done to her as a child. And she got him convicted of child sexual offences. However, as often happens in these cases, the judge made the decision to give him a reduced concurrent sentence. So that basically by the time he finished his murder sentence, he would also be completing his sexual offences sentence. So Jamie, at that point, was irate and she was like, well, I want to name him so that everyone in the community knows that this man is a sex offender and a risk to children.
16:10 Speaker 01 Now, when that gag law came in place, it meant that Jamie couldn't be named. Now, because her father is related to her, had he been named, it would have indirectly identified Jamie, which is also against the law. So his name became, because Jamie's name is suppressed, his name became suppressed because he's related to her. So he was actually protected
16:33 Speaker 00 By the law.
16:34 Speaker 01 By this gag law on Jamie's name. So Jamie became determined that she would get, and we became determined, and I've worked with Mark Lawyers on this, we became determined that we would get Jamie a court order so that she could be named. Now, I mentioned before that there was also a gag on any women, men, children who had been sexually assaulted and were now deceased. That included Jamie's sister. So when we went to court to get Jamie's court order so she could name herself and her father, the judge said, well, but there's also this secondary suppression on the sister's name, which also affects all of you. So I'm sorry, but you can't name yourself Jamie because you don't have permission. Like this whole circular logic.
17:13 Speaker 01 Anyway, so we had to keep going back. We had to, in effect, also get a court order to name the deceased sister as well.
17:20 Speaker 00 And pay each time.
17:21 Speaker 01 And pay each time. And so that was the GoFundMe. So thank you to everyone in the public that donated to that GoFundMe. We ended up getting over $200,000 that paid for all of the court orders across Tasmania, the NT and Victoria. And each time I would go to court with these people and Mark lawyers would do the legal work, we'd get these court orders and then I'd break the story. But of course, this was in 2020, which was, Victoria was in lockdown because of COVID.
17:44 Speaker 00 Yep.
17:44 Speaker 01 And so the survivors that I was working with in Victoria, they were kind of holding this double trauma of being silenced by the law. Also having the attorney general defend the law and also then having COVID and being in lockdown. So that, that part of the campaign was actually incredibly traumatic and I, and I was pregnant and I had a complex pregnancy. So in the end, eventually, finally, in November 2020, we actually got the Victorians to reverse course and to finally change that law.
18:19 Speaker 01 And, and I'm obviously very pleased that they did change the law, but it was, by the end of that year, I was completely burnt out and traumatised. I have to say, I was, and I was heading into 21, had no idea that Grace Hame was just about to be named Australian of the Year and the Brittany Higgins stuff was all about to explode. And I was, yeah, I was now heavily, heavily pregnant and I had the baby and as soon as I had the baby, I had to, I became, I actually developed an autoimmune condition and I had to then completely step back for quite a while. Yeah. So I've got the same autoimmune condition that Michael Clem has. It's a degenerative nerve condition. And I lost the ability to walk for a while and.
19:05 Speaker 01 It was actually very traumatic because we didn't know what it was and I I was in excruciating pain and I'd lost the ability to walk and I would hold my newborn and I couldn't feel. So it affects your sensory nerves. I couldn't actually feel him. My hands couldn't hold, like I would hold him, but I couldn't feel. But my lips still had feeling and I would just kiss the back of his head. Like in every photo, my lips are on the back of his head because that's where I could still feel him. Yeah. So I had to really, really step back in 2021 for health reasons. And then it's sort of only been in the last few years that I've been able to get back to work.
19:40 Speaker 00 I feel like a lot of people won't know that context. So thank you for sharing that.
19:43 Speaker 01 Yeah. And I still, again, like, big thanks to everybody who donates plasma or blood products. I get every four weeks, I have a four to five hour plasma transfusion to manage my illness. And that's why I'm able to walk again. And yeah.
19:57 Speaker 00 That still has a huge impact on your life.
19:58 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, absolutely. Like, I've had to relocate back to Sydney. I, you know, because there's better hospitals here. I've, it, yeah, it impacts my movement, my day to day physicality and so on. But thankfully, because of plasma transfusions, so it's called chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, which is a bit of a mouth, but CIDP for short. And it's, it's been its own journey. And it's made me quite interested, actually, in the relationship between trauma and autoimmune connections or autoimmune conditions, because there is a connection between the two. And it's highly likely that the amount of stress and trauma that I was under in 2020 is actually a direct trigger to me developing the illness. Yeah, yeah.
20:42 Speaker 00 So what made you want to go back in and do more? Because in 2022, you did a whole new campaign.
20:48 Speaker 01 Yes.
20:50 Speaker 00 Called Justice Shouldn't Hurt. So it didn't stop you.
20:53 Speaker 01 It stopped me for a while. But no, well, what made me want to come back was it was an email that I received from a guest that you've had on recently, Michelle Millthorpe. I got this email from Michelle, who's a mum, saying that her daughters had
21:08 Speaker 01 Gone through the criminal justice process in New South Wales and that the process was
21:14 Speaker 01 worse than the abuse itself, which is not an uncommon thing. I hear that all the time. But what was different about this email was that the daughters had done research and they had found a program called the Child Sexual Offence Evidence Programme, which is proven to make court less traumatic for children and young people going through sexual offence matters. And the problem was, and the programme, and this is really significant, and you know, having worked in a university context, I know the importance of things being evidence-based and evaluated and best practice. And this programme had been evaluated by some academics who I happen to know who are very, very good academics. And it was an independent evaluation that showed it worked and that it was highly effective in reducing trauma.
21:58 Speaker 01 The problem was that the programme was only available in Sydney and in Newcastle, which meant that for every other child outside of those two locations in New South Wales, they did not have access to that programme, which also means that they don't have equitable access to justice. And this is what we call postcode justice, this idea that your access to justice is conditional on the postcode you live in. The Millthorpe sisters had done this research and were saying that they wanted to tell their stories in order to push for this programme to be expanded across the state, so that every child in need of the programme had access to it. And I thought firstly, that's incredibly impressive, but not only have they identified the problem, they've also identified a solution and it's
22:41 Speaker 01 a solution that's got an evidence base around it. Secondly, it's a campaign waiting to happen because you've got all the elements. You know, one of the things that I, when I teach other people about campaigning is that you need to be able to really clearly explain the problem and also have a really clear solution, which is clear, measurable and specific. You also need to have a clearly defined decision maker, the person that has the power to actually make that change. Because oftentimes I see campaigns where they spend an awful lot of time convincing the wrong people. They're convincing people that actually don't have the power to make the change. So I thought, I, I think I can help the Millthorpe family and the Millthorpe sisters
23:21 Speaker 01 because they've done the research, they had the lived experience to talk about the impact of the justice system. What they don't have is a megaphone.
23:32 Speaker 00 They needed you to amplify them.
23:33 Speaker 01 And so, and so that, that is essentially what became the Justice Shouldn't Hurt Campaign. To do that, we actually had to, because in New South Wales, you know, survivors can self-identify in media, provided they're over a certain age. And because of the girls' young ages, we did actually need to go to court and get them a court order to exempt them so that they could self-identify in the media. And we made a lot of very, um, we, we worked really hard with the family to tell their story in a way that was sensitive and ethical and respectful. You know, I didn't ask them a single question about the abuse or the abuser. I didn't name the abuser. I didn't go into a single detail about any of that.
24:08 Speaker 00 Really?
24:08 Speaker 01 No, no, because they're, because of their age.
24:10 Speaker 00 Yeah.
24:11 Speaker 01 Okay. So they were five and eight when the abuse happened. They had to wait two and a half years for it to even get to court, during which time they couldn't speak to each other or their parents about what had happened to them because that's considered contaminating the witnesses. If you can imagine you're five years old and then two, you've got to retain this memory by yourself for two and a half years before, like that in and of itself is.
24:30 Speaker 00 Impossible.
24:31 Speaker 01 Well, it's, it's cruel.
24:32 Speaker 00 Yeah.
24:33 Speaker 01 Like it's, it's actually cruel and heartless.
24:35 Speaker 00 You spoke about at the start, having to put your life on hold for six months.
24:37 Speaker 01 Absolutely.
24:38 Speaker 00 This is two and a half years.
24:39 Speaker 01 I mean, and you're, that's half your life over again.
24:41 Speaker 00 Yeah.
24:41 Speaker 01 Right. They're from Aubrey Wodonga. They had to relocate to Sydney and live in a hotel room for three months. When it actually went to trial, they couldn't have their parents present, as you said. They were cross-examined for days and days on end. Then a jury member fell asleep. So they had to release the jury, empanel a new jury and start the process all over again. I mean, these, and these are just, these are young girls who have already been through something incredibly, incredibly distressing and traumatic. Also, the nature of our justice system in general, like we know that in terms of if somebody's been impacted by sexual assault trauma, what they need is to be able to tell their story, and particularly children, they need to be able to tell their story in their own words,
25:25 Speaker 01 in their own time and space. Without intrusive interrogating questioning, they need to be able to, you know, ideally, like in a therapeutic set setting, be believed and listened to. And our justice system is the exact opposite of that.
25:39 Speaker 00 Yeah.
25:40 Speaker 01 The, the starting premise is that the accused person is innocent and so that therefore you must be lying. We're going to interrogate, interrogate, interrogate. We're not going to let you tell your story in your own way. We're going to force it out of you in a way that suits our purposes. There's a great quote by Judith Herman, that if you set out to design a system to provoke the symptoms of trauma, it would look very much like our current criminal justice system. So the girls very bravely, as part of the Justice Shouldn't Hurt campaign, told their story and had written a petition. And the goal was to get 20,000 signatures on the petition. Because if you get 20,000 signatures in New South Wales, then Parliament is committed to at least debating the issue.
26:21 Speaker 01 When we broke the story on news.com.au, we got those 20,000 signatures within eight hours, which, you know, was huge for the girls.
26:29 Speaker 00 That's amazing.
26:30 Speaker 01 Yeah, and, and huge kudos to the girls. And then, uh, three months later, uh, so I, we continued to write story after story about their plight as a family, but also about other people's experiences, um, within New South Wales of access to this program. Um, and the fact that it needed to be rolled out across the whole state. And three months later, the government came to the party and they committed $64.3 million to roll out that program across the whole state. I raise that because I just think that those sisters, what they did is extraordinary and deserves every accolade under the sun.
27:10 Speaker 00 100%. They are so strong.
27:13 Speaker 01 As you know, Michelle Millthop, their mother is now running for a seat.
27:17 Speaker 00 She is. So the people of Farah.
27:19 Speaker 01 Yep.
27:20 Speaker 00 Get around her. Tell me about what you're doing now, because you're you're straight back into something new.
27:26 Speaker 01 Okay, so my latest campaign.
27:28 Speaker 00 It feels like you you get each idea from the idea that you're in. Is that what's happened here?
27:33 Speaker 01 Well, I think that like I'm I love campaigning and the thing about campaigning is you need a clearly defined problem, a clearly defined solution, and then you need people who are able to speak to that issue and humanize that issue. And so it tends to be the other way around that like someone will approach me like the Millthorpes will, or I'll just sort of, you know, I randomly met Grace, I'll learn a problem and then I'll start thinking, okay, now, how do I work with this person to tell their story and also to somehow get some sort of positive reform out of it? So I was approached by a young woman called Jess Denham. Now Jess's story is, again, horrific. Jess is an adult survivor of child sexual abuse. Both of her parents are currently in jail for what they did to her, starting at age five.
28:15 Speaker 01 Her father is actually serving the longest jail sentence ever recorded in Australian history for child sexual offending. His name's William Robert Gilfillan, and I've been doing investigation on him, and I'm now up to 17 victims of his. Yeah, he used to be a PE teacher in Victoria before he relocated to New South Wales and had a family. As part of the criminal case in 2016 against the two parents, Jess's counselling notes were, her sexual assault counselling notes were subpoenaed into evidence. Now, if you can imagine, for anyone who accesses sexual assault counselling, the automatic default assumption is that that material will be confidential.
28:52 Speaker 00 Yeah, protected.
28:53 Speaker 01 Absolutely. And I remember being in sexual assault counselling at Royal North Shore after my own assault. And the very first thing that my counsellor said to me was, what is said in these four walls stays in these four walls. And I believed that.
29:03 Speaker 00 Yeah.
29:03 Speaker 01 And that counselling actually probably, it's what kept me together, you know, it's what it, I have no doubt it's what kept me alive at points. Now, for Jess, when her counselling notes were subpoenaed, that meant that her father could then read the very detail, like her deepest, darkest thoughts, fears, nightmares, everything, and the impact of what he had done to her. And we know that this is actually happening all the time. Offenders or accused people in sexual offence matters across Australia are subpoenaing the sexual assault counselling notes of victim survivors. Now, what that does to a person is that it erodes trust in vital mental health counselling services and often, as what happened with Jess, they then disengage from that service.
29:47 Speaker 00 So you're telling Jess's story?
29:48 Speaker 01 Yeah, so I've, so basically, I've told, I've recently published Jess's story where she has now gone public for the very first time to tell her entire story of what happened to her growing up, who her father is. He was convicted of these additional offences in December. He's facing, he's actually facing more sentencing right now. Since breaking that story, multiple other victim survivors of his have come forward and made more police statements. But Jess also wants to tell her story to highlight the fact that, the fact that her offender could read her sexual assault counselling notes without her consent is a violation and a re-traumatisation that should have never, ever happened. The fact that those counselling notes were then shared with media who used them without
30:31 Speaker 01 consent is a further egregious violation of her dignity and her rights. And the fact that we know it's not just Jess Denham who has experienced this. So I've now done a Freedom of Information investigation to find out how often is 1-800 Respect being subpoenaed? It turns out 1-800 Respect is being subpoenaed on average, once a week, every week.
30:50 Speaker 00 Once a week?
30:52 Speaker 01 Yep. And not only are they handing over the written client notes, they are handing over the actual audio recordings of counselling phone calls and video recordings of video calls. And I've spoken to a young woman, Madeline Lane. So Madeline Lane was raped in 2020 by a man named Boyd Kramer, a man from Mossman, who she met on Tinder and he was subsequently convicted of rape. The night of the rape, Madeline had fled his apartment and called 1-800 Respect and then called Full Stop Australia. Both 1-800 Respect and Full Stop Australia were subpoenaed for the phone calls or the contacts that she made to their services that night. 1-800 Respect didn't even check in with Maddie before handing over word for word, verbatim,
31:35 Speaker 01 the entire transcript of that contact. Full Stop Australia did fight, did challenge their subpoena and were successful. So what the Keep Counselling Confidential campaign is all about is to say that In this country, sexual assault survivors who access counselling had the, make the assumption that that is confidential and they should be able to make that assumption because counselling is not safe if it's not confidential. People are not going to open up if they think that anyone could eavesdrop, let alone their rapist eavesdropping in on what they're talking about.
32:05 Speaker 00 The whole courtroom could hear it.
32:07 Speaker 01 Yep. So Maddie's, Maddie's, um, Madeline Lane's contact to 1800 Respect was not only read by her offender Boyd Kramer, it was actually read out word for word in court. So basically the, the idea of the campaign is to say that we need an absolute privilege or an absolute protection on counselling notes in these matters. So in the same way that, you know, if you go and talk to your lawyer, you have client attorney privilege. What you say in that room is sacred. It's, it's safe, it's protected. Likewise, you know, if some people go to their priests, that can be a privileged conversation, it can be protected. If people come and speak to me as a journalist, I can actually invoke, invoke media shield laws to refuse to hand that over. And yet if you go to a sexual assault counsellor right now, that conversation is not protected.
32:52 Speaker 00 Scary.
32:52 Speaker 01 It is. It's, it's really alarming. And I think particularly when I got that Freedom of Information, um, data back, uh, and discovered that they're being FOI'd once a week, every week, that for me was like this watershed moment of going, okay, this is not, Jess Denham's case is not an absurd outlier. This is actually happening on the reg and we need to stop this. So we started a petition called, Don't subpoena our support, keep counselling confidential. People get on it right now because that's the campaign that we're really pushing for at the moment. And we're really hoping that the New South Wales Attorney General, Michael Daly, will, will hear the call and will, will realise that, you know,
33:33 Speaker 01 what is said in, in those moments in counselling, I mean, from a legal perspective, it's not even that useful because it's hearsay evidence anyway. That's the first thing. But far more important than that is that following a sexual assault.
33:47 Speaker 01 People should be able to access that counselling, safe in the knowledge that it genuinely is confidential and that they can park their feelings, their fears, their impact, they can talk about the impacts of trauma without their offender ever being able to read that. And I think, you know, I've spoken to one person who, when she reported to the police, the police said to her, "Don't get counselling until after the criminal trial is over", which might be two to three years, "but don't get counselling before then because if you do, we can't guarantee it will be safe."
34:22 Speaker 00 What's the point of that?
34:24 Speaker 01 Well, yeah.
34:24 Speaker 00 You need it earlier, you need it during.
34:26 Speaker 01 Absolutely. And if people are then delaying access to counselling for two to three years, or they're being forced to choose between your access to justice or your access to confidential counselling, that's a binary choice that survivors should never be put in. And you're exactly right. People need that counselling. The earlier you get counselling, the better the outcomes. And particularly when you're going through something as traumatic as a trial or an investigation, having that additional support is really, really important. We launched the campaign last month and already a lot of services and others have joined it. And so, because this doesn't only affect the sexual assault survivors, it also affects the counsellors as well.
35:06 Speaker 00 Yeah.
35:06 Speaker 01 When their notes are subpoenaed and they feel powerless to stop it, or, you know, it's going to cost them an arm and a leg to hire a barrister for the day to try and challenge that subpoena. Or their notes, there is no way for them to block it and the notes are just handed over. They will often feel very violated themselves, or they might feel like they let their client down. Because, you know, I've had one councillor say to me, "I lie in bed awake at night thinking, maybe she never came to me, she'd be better off."
35:34 Speaker 01 Yeah, so we want this law reformed and we want people to get behind it.
35:40 Speaker 00 Well, we'll definitely be putting that petition in our show notes. I feel like I could talk to you for hours, Nina. But lastly, I just wanted to ask you, is this the only way we make reform, bit by bit? When we find these...
35:55 Speaker 00 Big but little issues in a, in a, a, a complex system that really needs a huge overhaul. Like, yeah, how do we, how do we change it?
36:04 Speaker 01 Yeah.
36:05 Speaker 00 On a bigger scale.
36:06 Speaker 01 This is like one of those age old things that I often wrestle with of, am I just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic? Like.
36:11 Speaker 00 Well, you're making meaningful change, but how do we make?
36:13 Speaker 01 But the system itself is, is.
36:15 Speaker 00 Is flawed.
36:15 Speaker 01 Yeah. And, and the origins of the system itself is flawed. Um, which I, I agree, I agree with that too. I also am pragmatic and realistic and it is the system we have and incremental change is still, it still has value. I think though, in the same way that I said at the beginning, justice comes in all different shapes and sizes. And traditional justice is just one idea of justice. You know, some people get justice by sharing their stories. Some people get justice, you know, through, there, there's a myriad ways in which we can think about what that looks like for an individual. I also think change comes in all different shapes and sizes and what people do.
36:55 Speaker 01 You know, my form of activism or advocacy and change is using the media as a vehicle to spark law reform. Or to generate, try to generate systemic reform. That's one type, but there's all kinds of change that people are already doing within their own communities. Changing attitudes within their own families, changing attitudes within their schools, doing education, doing, you know, community based work.
37:21 Speaker 01 You know, a whole lot of social work is about change. Like there's all different types of reform. This is just my little piece of the puzzle, I guess.
37:27 Speaker 00 It's a pretty big piece of the puzzle. I think you've also really changed the way the media in Australia talks about victim survivors. Because I think you model the behaviour that I hope a lot of other places are starting to adopt.
37:43 Speaker 01 I think it's more that. The survivors that I have profiled have, like when I was doing the Let Her Speak campaign, there was this great moment where I was working with one of the survivors in Tasmania. So her name's Janelle O'Connor. And at the time, we had not got her court order yet. And so we couldn't identify her real name and face yet. And so she had chosen a pseudonym for herself. And we had to take a photograph where she wasn't, her face wasn't visible. The photographer had the brief, went out, took a photo of her and it was her head in her hands, sort of crouched down, very fetal position. It almost looked like she was crying in her hands. It was so disempowering. It was the typical kind of old school way in which victim survivor stories are presented.
38:26 Speaker 01 You know, very sort of, you know, fetal position, almost like, you know, rocking in the corner. Often in shadowy sort of, I looked at it, I hated it. I showed it to Janelle, she hated it as well. We were like, this photographer has not understood the brief. You know, this is a strong empowered woman who wants to say her name and who is demanding law reform, having experienced child sexual abuse. How dare we present her in that, you know, in that light of being,
39:00 Speaker 01 you know, feeble and, and almost broken.
39:04 Speaker 00 Yeah.
39:04 Speaker 01 So I said to the editor, no, we're not using that photo. Janelle's 14 year old son picked up a camera, took her hand and, because he saw it too and he was like, no, that's bullshit. Wrote the words, let us speak on her hand.
39:19 Speaker 00 That's how it came about.
39:20 Speaker 01 She put her hand then in front of her face to kind, so that she couldn't be identified. He took the photo of her hand, but covering her face so that we could still use it legally.
39:33 Speaker 01 And it was the most, and it was a really strong photo because it was her hand down the barrel of the camera, saying, let us speak. And that not only became, not only did we use that photo in print in the newspaper the next day, but that became the iconic image of the entire campaign. And we recreated that image over and over and over again. That didn't come from me. That came from a 14 year old boy who knew his mom was a badass and who was refusing to see her portrayed. And she and I were also in full agreement that she should not be portrayed in the stereotypical way that victim survivors are portrayed. And I think like, one of the things that I'm really proud of with the Let Her Speak, Let Us Speak
40:13 Speaker 01 campaign was that we really did at every point, you know, want to reposition and revisit how we portray victim survivors, the victim survivors, you know, so often in the media, victim survivors historically have been positioned as broken, downtrodden, to be pitied, to be sympathised. And that's not empowering at all.
40:38 Speaker 00 No.
40:40 Speaker 01 Whereas I think one of the things that was successful about the campaign, you know, I often reflect on, when we do a campaigns, we reflect on the things that maybe didn't work so well, and also the things that did work well, so that we learn for next time. And one of the things that I think did work well in that campaign was obviously, you know, we got the law reform, which was the major goal. But the other thing was like, we really actually reimagined how we do photography in this, in this campaign. And I think the other thing that for me was the win of that campaign, was that generally when we report stories about sexual violence, the audience tends to skew very heavily female. Suddenly, when I was doing the Let Her Speak, Let Us Speak campaign, we had huge numbers of men reading, and we didn't know why initially.
41:22 Speaker 01 And then we realised it was because we were hooking it on freedom of speech.
41:26 Speaker 00 Ah.
41:27 Speaker 01 Turns out, men really care about freedom of speech.
41:29 Speaker 00 They really like that.
41:29 Speaker 01 They do. Particularly like conservative, old white men.
41:32 Speaker 00 Yeah.
41:33 Speaker 01 Like, so suddenly, we had this, we had this captive audience of men, and don't generally click on those stories, but who were now engaged and listening. So my editor and I were like, all right, well, now we've got them, why don't we use this as like a bit of a Trojan horse?
41:46 Speaker 00 Yep.
41:46 Speaker 01 To get some feminist vegetables into them, and to educate them about things like victim blaming and, and rape myths, which is, which is what we did. So yeah, I'm really, I'm, I'm proud of that campaign and the reforms that it has achieved. But I'm also proud of some of the conversations that it started in some unexpected places.
42:05 Speaker 00 You definitely should be.
42:06 Speaker 01 Thank you.
42:06 Speaker 00 Thank you so much for being you, Nina.
42:09 Speaker 01 Well, thank you for having me today.
42:12 Speaker 00 Thank you to Nina for sharing her story and the multiple stories of other victim survivors with us. You can find out more about her work and her most recent campaign in our show notes. If you're experiencing sexual violence, please head to our show notes for some numbers to contact. If you want to see visuals from this episode, head over to our Instagram page @truecrimeconversations. And for in-depth case explainers, follow us on TikTok under the same name. True Crime Conversations is hosted by me, Gemma Bath. Our senior producer is Tali Blackman. The group executive producer is Alaria Brophy, and there's been audio design by Jacob Round and video editing by Julian Rosario. Thanks so much for listening. I'll be back next week with another True Crime Conversation.
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