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Federal Attorney-General Christian Porter has said he is “not particularly religious”.

Moreover, he has been described by a former Labor MP as a “bit of a lad” in his university days. He has admitted that he has not always been “a good husband” to his wife, from whom he is now separated. So he’s no saint.

Nevertheless, the recent accusation that he raped a 16-year-old girl in Sydney in January 1988, when he was 17 and both were participating in a national debating competition, is just that: an allegation.

The baying mob of journalists at his press conference on 3 March had to be seen to be believed. The rule of law, and the time-honoured legal principle that an accused must be presumed innocent unless proved guilty, flew out the window.

The Attorney-General strenuously and categorically denied the allegations made in the 33-page letter. He stated, again and again, that the alleged event never happened – pointing out that he was just a teenage boy at the time.

The presumption of innocence is fundamental to our society.  Abandon it and our society would degenerate into mob rule. Anyone – you, I or any of our leaders – could have our life destroyed by a single unproved allegation. The Salem witch trials in Massachusetts in 1692-3 tragically resulted in nineteen people hanged merely based on allegations.

Australia has a rigorous justice system for testing allegations.  First, a matter must be reported to the police, who assess whether there is enough “admissible evidence” to warrant prosecution.

For evidence to be “admissible” it must be first-hand knowledge, not (second-hand) hearsay. One difficulty with the allegations against Christian Porter is that the alleged victim tragically took her own life on 25 June 2020 and cannot now give evidence.

The allegations are contained in a detailed, but anonymous letter apparently from the now-deceased woman, sent to several politicians by the deceased woman’s friends. Since the friends did not witness the alleged events, the allegations are essentially hearsay.

While she was alive, the woman refused to make a statement to the police, who would require her to swear or affirm that the statement was true. Furthermore, two days before she took her own life, she asked the police to drop the complaint, for medical and personal reasons.

Notes made by Christian Porter’s accuser, as featured in a dossier containing her rape allegations

As a student, the complainant was said to be a brilliant debater. Sadly, over subsequent decades she suffered from long bouts of mental illness, including a bipolar disorder. This can be associated with delusions.

Extracts of the dossier containing the allegations, published in The Australian, are rather strange.  The complainant says she only really understood her memories “once my Sydney-based psychologist Katie Thorncraft referred me to The Body Keeps Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma (Van Der Kolk).” Bessel van der Kolk is a defender of discredited repressed-memory therapy.

Katie Thorncraft is listed as a staff psychologist at a Sydney centre owned by a “Clairvoyant and Certified Angel Intuitive”.  Thorncraft is a practitioner of quasi-hypnotic counselling that has been subject to evidentiary restrictions in Australian courts because of its potential to affect memory.

On 2 March 2021 the NSW police closed their investigation. We may never know the whole truth.

But as the Bible says in Deuteronomy 19:15, “One witness is not enough to convict a man accused of any crime or offence he may have committed. A matter must be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.”

Christian Porter is entitled to be presumed innocent.

Peter Downie - National Director

FamilyVoice Australia