source : the age
Warning: graphic content
The witness closes his eyes as he goes to retrieve a memory.
He is being grilled on the finer details of his allegation that former broadcaster Alan Jones placed a hand on his penis while they were driving down to Jones’s farm at Fitzroy Falls in 2004. He has told the court that he was behind the wheel, and that Jones had been drifting and waking in starts.
“I’m going to take a minute and I’m going to put myself back in the car,” “J” says, as he passes into reverie. Then his face grows troubled and his lips begin to move, first soundlessly and then as though talking through Jones. “What’s happening? What’s happening [“J”]? Where are we?”
He opens his eyes. “I recall [Jones saying], ‘What’s happening?’ when he first grabbed me on the outside of my clothes. “What’s happening?”
Gabrielle Bashir, SC, peers at “J” over her glasses.
“You just closed your eyes and I suggest that that was a performance for the court of going back and remembering being there, when in fact you were just trying to recount something that you’ve memorised,” she says to the screen that is delivering “J” into the courtroom.
“No,” J replies. “I just recounted what happened.”
It is not the first time that J appeared to revisit distant memories. All through the trial he has been closing his eyes and seemingly transporting himself to distant times and places, mumbling conversations and moving his hands. It is the first time he has been ridiculed for it.
But the bubble of tension pops almost as quickly as it arrived, and Bashir steers back to January 2004, when Jones and “J” were travelling down to Fitzroy Falls. “J” recalls the twists and turns on the road, the work men on the verge, the position of his hands, and the times that Jones woke and slept.
When he raises a previously untold detail about Jones touching his scrotum, Bashir takes off her glasses and holds them in one hand. “When you described in detail to the prosecution the grabbing of your thighs and the grabbing of your penis, you never said anything about scrotum in that memory, did you?”
“I don’t recall.”
She will not let it pass. Why not? Was this correct? Was that correct? Was this a false memory? She zeroes closer. He transports himself back to the car. He remembers Jones squeezing his penis and pulling it out of his trousers, and the comments that passed between them.
Alan Jones, hearing this evidence, lifts his chin and narrows his eyes into seeds, staring at the witness on the screen for perhaps the first sustained period since this cross-examination began. He shows just enough ankle to reveal that his red, rouge and russet striped socks play in symphony with his burgundy trousers. Jones vehemently denies all the allegations against him.
And Bashir presses on, all through this day and into the next. She suggests to “J” that he is making up stories, and she queries why he did not resist Jones’s advances.
“You didn’t once slam on the brakes when you said his hand started wandering?” (No, I swerved.) “You didn’t smack his hand away?” (No.) “You didn’t give him a good whack, did you?” (No.) “These were all things you could have done if he had tried to grab you in the manner that you allege, weren’t they?” (I could have done.)
She squeezes him on credibility, and she squeezes him on reliability. When he remembers an event, she suggests that he could not possibly remember that level of detail so many years later. When his evidence drifts from his earlier accounts, she seizes on it.
“You are trying to wriggle out of an inconsistency in your evidence, aren’t you?”
On Friday morning she invites “J” to accept that he could have turned Jones down without any repercussions.
Jones had given “J” a mobile phone, a car and weekly payments of hundreds of dollars so he had financial security while he was developing as an athlete. “J” agrees that Jones did not threaten to take these things away or curb his largesse if he resisted the older man’s advances. Bashir asks whether Jones withdrew financial support after “J” turned down his offer to stay at his apartment.
“No, but I didn’t like it when he was disappointed in me,” “J” says. “It was not a good time. It was not a good feeling. You felt very, very disappointed in yourself, and quite hollow.”
Five days he has stood on the stand, returning to those days in his late teens when he says he was afraid. Jones sits in the front row, one leg crossed over the other, his face dropping into his jowls, and his hands clasped on his lap.
Support is available from the National Sexual Assault, Domestic Family Violence Counselling Service at 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732) or the Men’s Referral Service on 1300 766 491.
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