There are some gentle, normally reassuring phrases which become chilling when their meaning is subverted, when they are instead deployed as tools of control.
Such appeared to be the effect on Person 17, when, according to her, Ben Roberts-Smith told her she was being a “good girl” the morning after he allegedly punched her in a Canberra hotel room in late March 2018.
Ben Roberts-Smith at the Federal Court on Tuesday.Credit:Nick Moir
In harrowing testimony on Tuesday, Roberts-Smith’s former lover said he’d told her she was being a “good girl”, because when he asked if she’d remembered what had happened in the room the previous evening, she replied “no”.
But that wasn’t the case. On the gut-wrenching account which she gave the court, she remembered plenty.
She gave evidence that she recalled them both attending a function at parliament house the night before; how she had to sit at a separate table because he was a part of the official ceremony; how they both had been drinking earlier in the day; how he had given her angry looks through the evening as she drank and chatted with other men at her table including federal minister Darren Chester; how she’d fallen down the stairs to the car park at the end of the evening; how he’d rounded on her when they got back to their hotel room, grabbing her by the shoulders, shaking her and demanding to know “what the f—k have you done”, suggesting she had unmasked their affair. And then how he’d punched her when she complained her head was hurting.
“Why did you say [next morning] you couldn’t remember what had happened … in the room?” she was asked by Nine’s counsel, Nicholas Owens, SC.
“I was afraid of what he would do if I didn’t say that,” she replied quietly. She agreed to tell her husband that she’d been drinking, alone, and been injured falling down stairs.
Person 17’s identity is protected, so her softly-spoken voice is the only guide we have to her demeanour in the witness box. She struggled through tears at times as she led the court through every twist and turn in her doomed extra-marital affair with the Victoria Cross recipient, which ran from mid-October 2017 to early April 2018. It began with her blissful sense that Roberts-Smith “seemed to me to be perfect”.
It would end when Person 17, shattered, drove to Roberts-Smith’s marital home and confessed all to his wife Emma. Person 17 took that action, she said because otherwise she felt, “I was never going to be free of him”.
On Person 17’s recollection, Roberts-Smith told her on their last night together that she was “like crack”, and “really hard to give up,” but if they stayed on the “same page” she had nothing to worry about. But he warned, allegedly: “If you… turn on me, I will burn your house down and it might not be you that gets hurt, but people that you love.”
Roberts-Smith has strongly denied punching or threatening the woman; last year he told the court he abhorred domestic violence. He claims any injuries she incurred the night of the ceremony in Canberra were because of her fall down the stairs.
He’s also insisted that his affair with Person 17 only occurred during a period of separation from his then wife Emma – a claim his now estranged wife told the court last month was false. More of this sad tale will unfold before the court on Wednesday.
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