Gradual Thawing as Fragile Case Fell Apart

On July 9, the third day of the hearing, Rita Theophanous began to look relaxed. She appeared to be gaining confidence as the evidence against her husband, Theo, was tested.

Her demeanour that day was a far cry from her stony face and closed stance three days earlier when she sat seething as the case against her husband was outlined to the magistrate charged with deciding whether he would stand trial for rape.

Mrs Theophanous and her daughter, Katerina, had sat either side of Mr Theophanous, the 21-year veteran upper house MP and former government minister, as Crown prosecutor Michele Williams, SC, went through the allegation against him in graphic detail. Ms Williams told magistrate Peter Reardon that Mr Theophanous had lured an acquaintance to Parliament late on the night of September 10, 1998, and then forcibly and violently raped her on the couch in his office, covering her face with his hand to stifle her cries - leaving red "stamp-like" marks that did not fade for days.

Ms Williams said that Mr Theophanous was interrupted by a phone call made by one of the alleged victim's friends. She said he then stopped abruptly and pulled up his trousers, allowing the woman to answer her phone. Then, in complete silence, the pair took the old Parliament House lift downstairs, and left the building by the staff entrance.

Outside on the loose gravel, according to Ms Williams, Mr Theophanous turned to the woman and said: "What I like about you is you're loyal."

The woman said in her statement to police that she took the comment as a threat. She said she spent the next few hours "with [a friend] or just driving around - I can't remember". But what she was sure of was that she made some calls to friends and told them she was raped.

The phone records, Ms Williams said, proved this.

But on the third day of the committal hearing in the Melbourne Magistrates Court, one of those women said that she had never received a distress call from her friend, and if she had she would have had no hesitation in calling the police.

"I would have dragged her to the police," she said. And she was adamant that she had never heard anything about the woman being raped.

Mrs Theophanous nodded approvingly and put her arm around her husband's back.

The next witness was the friend who the prosecution claimed had made the call that stopped the rape. This witness also denied knowledge of any such thing.

She told the court that she might well have spoken to her friend that night, but that at no stage had the alleged victim mentioned being raped. If she had, the friend said, she would have remembered it.

She said that she believed the alleged victim had falsified emails in her name.

"I don't talk like that. It's not my writing, my text. I don't speak like that," she said. Her husband, who followed her in the witness box, said the same thing.

It was not until Friday, July 10, five days into the hearing, that a witness gave evidence that supported the alleged victim's story.

The witness was a friend who now lives in London. In her statement to police, she said the alleged victim had called her on the night of the alleged rape and told her about it.

"She was in a horrible, horrible state," the woman told the court via video link from London in response to a question about the alleged victim's demeanour during the call.

Defence barrister Robert Richter, QC, then leaned forward into the microphone and asked "What did you do to help her? After the telephone call that you say you received from her, what did you do to help her?"

"I don't think I did anything to help her, I just told her to go to the police and left it at that."

Mrs Theophanous scoffed quietly in the background as over the course of the cross-examination Mr Richter picked apart elements of the woman's story and then accused her of wilfully lying.

She denied it.

The three-week hearing culminated in Mr Richter telling the court that the prosecution had brought forward a case predicated on lies and false documents and had acted with the blind conviction that Mr Theophanous was guilty.

The hardest scrutiny was reserved for Detective Sergeant Doug Smith, who as the lead investigator on the case exchanged an enormous number of emails with the alleged victim.

Mr Richter said this showed he had an inappropriate attachment to the case.

"I do not know whether it is the current political correctness that says anyone who says rape is telling the truth [but] the conduct in this case has been unprofessional at the least," he said on Thursday.

And as the magistrate announced his decision to discharge her husband, Mrs Theophanous smiled, put her arm around his shoulders and kissed him.

This piece was originally published in The Age. You can read it here.