She works for one of the leading barristers’ chambers in London. A very close friend of Amal Clooney, she has represented high-profile clients from Julian Assange to Amber Heard. And yet Australian human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson is an unassuming and generous person. Recently Robinson and her colleague Keina Yoshida published a book titled “How Many More Women?“, a powerful reconstruction of how, from the United Kingdom to Tasmania, from the United States to Dubai, the law is used as a weapon to silence women who are victims of sexual and gender-based violence. Like Nicola Stocker for example, a British woman who faced a legal ordeal after writing on Facebook that her former husband had tried to strangle her. Though the police evidence confirmed that her husband had violently grabbed her around her throat and the red marks were visible two hours after the police came, her ex-husband filed a defamation lawsuit and the British High Court trial judge ruled in his favour, arguing that “His intention was to silence, not to kill (her]). It took her years of litigation at crippling financial costs right up to the Supreme Court to obtain justice.
Il Fatto Quotidiano sat down for an in-depth interview with Jennifer Robinson.
You are from Australia, which was the first country in the world to allow women to sit in Parliament, in 1895. However, in your book you write that it was not until 1975 that the Australian Senate even bothered to install toilet facilities for women. What inspired you to work on women’s rights?
My grandmother in Australia ran domestic violence refuges for many years, when I was young. And I used to visit her in the refuges. She retired a long time ago, largely from the trauma associated with doing the work; just one too many women she was working with had been killed. We were reflecting one night about the statistics on violence against women, how one in three women have suffered from it. I was telling her the UN statistics, that one in three women have suffered sexual or gender-based violence. She was commenting that it was so depressing that the statistics hadn’t improved since her time working in the domestic violence refuge movement, and that got me thinking: what am I doing about this? I decided to write about women’s ability to speak about it. And the reason I did is that we can’t grapple with the problem of violence against women unless we understand the extent of it. There is a clear public interest in women being able to speak out about what has happened to them, yet in the law and in my legal practice I have been increasingly confronted with cases of journalists wanting to break these stories, and of women wanting to speak out, but being threatened with legal action. Together with my colleagues we wanted to write about this, to start a public conversation about the silencing of women. Because I think there is this perception, post-Me Too, that after women started breaking the culture of silence, people can say whatever they want online. But actually there are very real legal risks, and we wanted more women to be aware of those risks, and we want policy makers to understand how the law is inhibiting our ability to understand the extent of the problem of violence against women. We really need judges to be considering the broader question, not just a man’s right to reputation and privacy.
In your book you also tell inspiring stories like the story of Sarah Weddington. When she graduated in law in Texas in the 1960s, she couldn’t get a job in a law firm because law firms didn’t hire women in those days. She became a law professor and submitted one of the most important cases in the history of women’s rights: Roe v. Wade, which protected the right of American women to have an abortion. Do you believe we should change the education of women and men to make them aware of the brutal discrimination against women?
Yes, absolutely. We are seeing the rise of right-wing misogyny, particularly in online spaces, the rise of figures like Andrew Tate. From what I’ve seen in online discussions – the level of attacks that women journalists get, that women lawyers like me get, that my clients get – the internet has made visible the extent of misogyny in our society. And I think we really need to address that. Education is the beginning of how we should do it.
In the United Kingdom, you represented Amber Heard, who testified as a witness in the libel case filed by her former husband, Johnny Depp against the British tabloid The Sun, which had called him a wife beater. The Sun won the defamation case in the United Kingdom, though Depp won his defamation case against Heard in the United States. What is the most shocking thing you experienced in the Amber Heard case?
It’s difficult to choose one thing. There are so many troubling aspects to that case. I worked with Amber, I was her counsel as witness in the proceedings, and I worked with The Sun newspaper to prepare their truth defense, which was successful. I spent two years with her working on the evidence. And we won before a judge. There is a very detailed, 129-page judgement, which sets out the evidence that demonstrates that Johnny Depp was in fact violent towards her on twelve separate occasions. That’s a detailed judgement that sets out the testimony and the corroborating evidence: text messages, medical evidence and the like. It is horrifying to me that a case on the same facts could go before a jury in the United States and the jury could find in the opposite direction, and found that she lost. But what’s also terrifying about the case is that in front of the jury Johnny Depp’s team ran all the old male-centric tropes and stereotypes about gender-based violence, which judges are educated against, and won. Those tropes and stereotypes were then perpetuated through social media and online coverage of the trial, which is affecting children and teenagers all over the world. I had friends calling me during the U.S. trial saying that their son was repeating these tropes: she is a liar, she is a gold-digger, it’s not true, she didn’t go to the police. The third thing I would note about this case is the chilling effect it is having. There were something like 19 billion TikTok hits for ‘Justice for Johnny’ and 18 million for ‘Justice for Amber Heard’. The bias in the online space towards Johnny Depp was immense, and I think people need to question whether they are affected by that. Nothing about what happened to Amber Heard will ever encourage another woman to come forward, and that’s what’s so devastating about that case.
What can be done to stop the abuse of women who have experienced violence?
We need to improve our criminal justice system to make it easier for women to make complaints, and to educate police and prosecutors about stereotypes around who is a perfect victim, and things like ‘oh, he’s a nice guy, he couldn’t possibly do it’. We need better training for lawyers, for police, prosecutors and judges. We need better general understanding in society about gender-based violence. We need to acknowledge that it’s everywhere. Yes, it might not be all men, but there are enough, if one in three women has suffered violence…
In your book you relate that you were sexually harassed in two of the three law firms you worked in before you even graduated. How did you react to this sexual harassment?
One of the reasons I mention that in the book, and I was talking to younger lawyers, is: when I was a junior lawyer, I complained at the time internally, but I didn’t take it further than that. I really felt in the earliest stages of my career that I didn’t have the power to speak out about it, because it might affect my career trajectory. In fact, that was explicitly what I was advised. Now that I’m in a different position, being a well-known lawyer, having more power than I did as a junior lawyer, I think it’s very important that we try to dismantle systems that make it difficult for the women who are me when I was younger, to come forward.
Finally, if you had a chance to do just one thing to make the world less brutal for billions of women, what would you do?
One thing? I would eradicate all gender-based violence! But it’s a much more complicated question. One of the key things: I would remove laws that limit women’s ability to speak about it. Because, as you know as a journalist, and I know as a lawyer representing journalists, sunlight is often the best medicine, and if we can shine a light on a problem and talk about the problem, then we can start working towards fixing it.