2 hours ago
2
When Jennifer Robinson was a child, she and her sister used to visit their grandma at work. When they were there, they knew they were never to answer the door – there might be a violent man on the other side of it. They knew that the children they played with there were traumatised; their grandmother, Philipa Cracknell, told them so.
In the accepting way that children have, they normalised what grandma – a domestic violence survivor herself – did for her job. She worked at Bonnie, a shelter for abused women escaping abusive men, only the second to be established in NSW.
“I had a really early experience of understanding the dynamics of domestic violence and how that plays out for families and children,” Robinson says now. “That left a mark on me that I hadn’t appreciated. It wasn’t until my late 30s that I really sat down and asked my grandmother more questions about her life.”
Decades later, Robinson – now a London-based human rights lawyer who had helped defend WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, among other cases – was hanging out with her grandmother on the NSW south coast, on a break from her own work. Her grandmother was depressed and, over a whisky, Robinson asked her why.
“Because, you know, ‘You’re living down the south coast, it’s beautiful, you’re around family, retired, what is wrong with this picture?’” Robinson recounts. “And she was so upset. She said, ‘I just heard the statistics on violence against women on the radio, and it hasn’t gotten better from my time in the refuge.’”
That set Robinson thinking. “I was like, ‘I have to find a way to work on violence against women, but what is my way of doing this?’ I’m a free-speech lawyer. What am I going to do?’”
And then, Robinson says, “the #MeToo movement happened”.
“I was like, ‘OK, I’m a free-speech lawyer. I defend defamation cases. This is what I can do.’”
Robinson went on to do it, with great success, most notably in the case of Amber Heard, the actor and ex-wife of actor Johnny Depp. In 2020, Heard gave evidence about the abuse she suffered at the hands of her ex-husband, in the libel suit Depp brought against the UK’s The Sun newspaper, naming him as a “wife beater”.
The court’s decision, that the newspaper’s description of Depp was “substantially true”, and that 12 of the alleged 14 incidents of violence had occurred, should have vindicated her. But in 2022, Depp successfully sued Heard for defamation in a US court, after she wrote an opinion piece for the Washington Post. She didn’t name Depp in the piece but described herself as a survivor of domestic violence.
Heard’s case is the fulcrum of the new Australian film Silenced, adapted from the book How Many More Women?, which Robinson co-wrote with Dr Keina Yoshida. The documentary film, from International Emmy-award winning producers Selina Miles and Blayke Hoffman, is about the weaponisation of defamation law against women who speak out about sexual assault and abuse. It makes the case that the legal system is being used to discredit, intimidate and bankrupt victim-survivors.
It focuses on three women to make its point: Heard, Colombian journalist Catalina Ruiz-Navarro, who faced multiple legal suits from Colombian filmmaker Ciro Guerra after she published a #MeToo exposé on him; and finally, Brittany Higgins, who needs no introduction to Australian audiences.
In 2021, Higgins did a television interview with journalist Lisa Wilkinson alleging she was raped by fellow political staffer Bruce Lehrmann in 2019.
In the film, Higgins recounts leaving the Parliament House office of their boss, Defence Industry Minister Linda Reynolds, where the assault occurred. “I left, and things were different after that,” she says. “I was different after that.”
A 2022 criminal trial was aborted due to juror misconduct, and in 2024 Lehrmann sued Network Ten and Lisa Wilkinson for defamation for airing Higgins’ story. The judgment by the Federal Court’s Justice Michael Lee found, on the balance of probabilities, that Lehrmann had raped Higgins.
Since then, Higgins has herself been sued for defamation, successfully, by her former boss Linda Reynolds. However, that suit does not feature in the film, as the focus is the weaponisation of defamation laws by alleged perpetrators to silence survivors.
I meet Robinson and Higgins the morning following the Australian debut of Silenced at the Sydney Film Festival (its international debut was at the Sundance Film Festival in January). Robinson plays delightedly with Higgins’ new baby Freddie, who has accompanied his mother to Sydney from their home in Victoria. After a few minutes, the baby’s father, Higgins’ partner David Sharaz, spirits him away in search of coffee and we settle on sofas to talk about the film.
Both women are wearing blue jeans and the energy between them is easy, with Robinson occasionally taking a protective lead to answer on behalf of Higgins, particularly when it comes to questions on legally contentious topics.
“I’m a big believer in the power of storytelling,” Robinson says of the film, on which she is an executive producer. “Speech about violence against women is absolutely in the public interest, when you think about the extent of the problem, how many women in Australia are affected by it.
“And as I say, over and over, we can’t begin to tackle it if we can’t talk about it.”
Higgins has had a friendship with Robinson ever since the criminal trial of her alleged rapist, Lehrmann, during which Robinson sent her messages of support. It was on the strength of their friendship that Higgins agreed to participate in the film.
“It took a while for me to finally go, ‘I’m going to do this’,” Higgins says of her involvement. “I have very natural hesitancy towards a media lens.” But, Higgins adds with a laugh, “she’s a very hard person to say no to”.
The film depicts the heavy psychological toll the litigation takes on all the women, not least because the media spotlight is accompanied by torrents of internet abuse. In the case of Amber Heard, the abuse spilled over into real life. The film shows her arriving at London’s Royal Courts of Justice as Depp’s fans yell misogynistic hatred at her.
“Honestly, it was horrific,” says Robinson. “I’ve never seen anything like it, and you know, I worked on Julian Assange’s trial. I felt under threat from the most powerful government in the world … but I’ve never been attacked online as I was when I was representing Amber Heard.”
Higgins, who has also weathered much internet abuse, not to mention intense and sometimes malicious media scrutiny, says that the treatment “does fundamentally change you in a way that it’s difficult to articulate meaningfully. You definitely become hardened, and you definitely learn to be guarded.”
In one poignant scene in the film, Heard and Higgins meet and embrace. “We are in a really, un-fun club,” Heard quips.
Robinson also cops online abuse (according to one charmer, she has a “punchable face, like Amber”).
She splits her time between her practice in London, and her home on the NSW south coast. She surfs to unwind, and is in therapy.
Robinson says she is concerned by “a real backsliding in women’s rights globally”.
I ask Robinson and Higgins what they think of the contemporary backlash against feminism, from the rise of the manosphere, to the elevation of tradwife culture, as well as the pushback against reproductive rights in the United States and other countries.
“I mean, to an extent, there’s almost a compliment in there, that we did gain meaningful ground, so much so that it galvanised an opposing force to reclaim territory,” says Higgins. But, she adds, the rise of what she dubs the “online metasphere of misogyny content” has spread into other areas of life.
“That language has become normalised and metabolised, even by politicians,” Higgins says. “The veil has dropped ... people are out and open and saying these things. It’s scary … because I know it will have a trickle-down effect on the next woman who decides to come forward.”
Robinson says she is concerned by “a real backsliding in women’s rights globally”.
“When there’s a lot of misogyny in the online space and in public discussion … that has a knock-on effect for violence against women. Those two things are connected in very direct ways.”
But both women are optimistic about the advances already made, and Robinson says that “I actually don’t think that we can walk back the progress that was made with #MeToo”.
Higgins points to affirmative consent laws, anti-stealthing laws (which criminalise removing or not using a condom without your sexual partner’s consent) and better courtroom protections for alleged victims of sexual assault (reforms she has advocated for) as proof of progress.
“As my grandma said, it’s one step forward, two steps back, but then we progress again,” says Robinson. Robinson’s grandmother, who features in the film, is a common thread throughout it.
“What I love about my grandmother’s story is she reminds us how recent the gains were,” Robinson says. “She was lucky to have a bank account. When she left my grandfather, she couldn’t get credit to buy bunk beds for my mum and my aunt because she needed her husband’s signature.”
Perhaps the greatest act of defiance is survival. Cracknell, now 89 years old, was at the film’s Sydney premiere, glowing with pride and particularly eager to meet Higgins. The two had a long chat, Higgins tells me.
Silenced screens at the Melbourne International Film Festival from August 6-23 and in cinemas nationally from September 3.
Get the best of Sunday Life magazine delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning. Sign up for our newsletter.
