Ben Roberts-Smith punched me in the face, his former lover tells court - Sydney Morning Herald

Ben Roberts-Smith’s former lover has told the Federal Court that the war veteran punched her in the face during an argument in a hotel room in Canberra and subsequently took photos of her while she was undressed and asleep.

Mr Roberts-Smith has admitted in his defamation case that he had an affair with a woman dubbed Person 17 between October 2017 and April 2018, but has denied punching her.

Ben Roberts-Smith arrives at the Federal Court in Sydney on Tuesday.Credit:Nick Moir

Person 17, whose name has been suppressed by the court, was called to give evidence for The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Canberra Times, and appeared in the witness box for the first time on Tuesday. She gave emotional evidence she was “afraid of what he [Mr Roberts-Smith] would do” if she told her husband the truth about how she got a black eye, and the pair discussed the lie she would tell about falling down a flight of stairs while alone in Brisbane.

Mr Roberts-Smith had “said something like, ‘good girl, you hurt yourself when you fell over’,” Person 17 said.

The court heard Person 17 had accompanied Mr Roberts-Smith to a formal event at Parliament House in Canberra on March 28, 2018, and the pair spent several hours before the event drinking at a winery as well as at their hotel.

“I did continue drinking at the function, and I was quite drunk by the time we left,” Person 17 said.

She said Mr Roberts-Smith gestured angrily at her at the end of the function that they should leave, and she was approached by a man on her way out. She believed the man was trying to “pick me up”.

She asked the man to help her find Mr Roberts-Smith and the car park, she told the court, but she fell down some steps on the way there, bumping her head and bruising her thigh.

Person 17 said a COMCAR driver offered to take them to hospital but she and Mr Roberts-Smith went instead to their hotel room, where he became “really angry with me, he was sort of up in my face just inside the doorway, he was shaking me”.

She said he asked her, “what the f--- have you done? ... He said, ‘you were all over the other men at dinner, they’re all going to know we’re having an affair. I should have just left you there, you made a big scene as we were leaving’.”

Mr Roberts-Smith told her he let her into his world and trusted her but she “just treated it like a high school formal”, Person 17 said.

Ben Roberts-Smith at the Canberra function where the alleged incident happened.

Person 17 said she apologised and told him she knew she had behaved badly at the function, and that she was drunk, and pleaded with him to forget about the incident and go to bed because her head was hurting.

She said Mr Roberts-Smith replied that “it’s going to f---ing hurt more” or “I’ll show you hurt” before he punched her with his right fist on the left side of her face and eye.

Person 17 told the court that the pair had sex later in the evening and Mr Roberts-Smith held her and told her “it’s going to be okay”.

“I was just apologising to him and saying I loved him and how sorry I was.”

She said Mr Roberts-Smith woke her early the next morning and had packed her bags and laid out clothes for her. He also showed her photos on his phone of her naked and asleep in bed, Person 17 said, and asked her: “Do I need to keep these photos?”

Person 17 said she “didn’t say anything”.

Mr Roberts-Smith replied last year with a firm, “no, and that’s disgusting” when asked by the newspapers’ barrister, Nicholas Owens, SC, if he took a photo of Person 17 as she lay naked and asleep in their hotel bed.

“I’ve never done anything like that, and never would,” Mr Roberts-Smith said, and rejected a further allegation that he took the photos to have something to “hold over” Person 17.

He also denied punching Person 17, and has told the court he tended to her injury after she fell down the stairs while drunk.

Person 17 told the court that the affair ended in April 2018 after they met one last time. At that meeting, Mr Roberts-Smith had told her she was like “crack” and he would find it hard to give her up, she said.

She shared that sentiment, she said, because “even after everything that had happened, our relationship had become a bit like an addiction and we couldn’t stop”.

But Person 17 said Mr Roberts-Smith also told her that they needed to be “on the same page”, and he warned her that if she did anything “stupid”, he would “burn your house down”.

She might not get hurt, Person 17 said Mr Roberts-Smith told her, but people she loved and cared about might. He showed her photos of her diary and her bank cards that he had taken at the hotel, she said.

Earlier on Tuesday, Person 17 told the court she discovered she was pregnant in February 2018 and knew it was Mr Roberts-Smith’s child “as I hadn’t slept with anyone else apart from Ben” and “in any case, my husband had had a vasectomy”.

She said the pair agreed she should terminate the pregnancy, but she started to have “second thoughts about all of it”, including whether she wanted to keep seeing Mr Roberts-Smith and whether she wanted to go ahead with the abortion because “it’s not something I really believe in personally”.

Person 17 said that Mr Roberts-Smith became angry at her indecision and told her that “if I kept the baby ... he would not stick around long term”.

She told the court she subsequently had a miscarriage but “let him believe” for a time in March 2018 that she was still having a termination because the pair had been fighting and he hadn’t returned some of her calls, and she wanted to tell him “face to face”.

Person 17 agreed she initially told Mr Roberts-Smith in person that she had had a termination in Townsville because “I just knew that all he cared about was I wasn’t pregnant anymore”. But he told her he would get CCTV footage to check, and she admitted she had had a miscarriage.

She said he also showed her footage taken of her outside a Brisbane hospital getting into a taxi. Person 17 said Mr Roberts-Smith had forced her to take two pregnancy tests in front of him, the first of which was defective but the second of which yielded a positive result.

Mr Roberts-Smith has told the court he hired a private investigator to follow Person 17 to an abortion clinic in Brisbane because he believed she was lying about the pregnancy to get him to stay in the relationship. He said last year that Person 17 had given him “three stories” about what happened to the alleged pregnancy.

Person 17 told the court that Mr Roberts-Smith told her at a dinner after their conversation about the miscarriage that “he was a good friend to have, and not someone I would want to get on the wrong side of”.

“He told me that if he wanted to he could get into my bank accounts,” she said.

Mr Roberts-Smith told the court in June last year that he had separated with his now-estranged wife, Emma, in late September 2017, and they had remained separated for about six months.

“I’ve never disputed the fact that I’ve had an affair with Person 17,” he told the court last year, but he said they were separated at the time “and there’s a difference”.

But Emma Roberts told the court in February this year that the couple did not separate until January 2020 and she was unaware of the affair until Person 17 appeared out of the blue at the matrimonial home on April 6, 2018.

Person 17 said Emma Roberts’ mother, who was also at the home, asked her what had happened to her face, which still had a black eye, and she told her she had fallen down the stairs.

“Why did you not tell her the truth?” Mr Owens asked.

Person 17 said through tears: “I’d just gone there to make sure that that was the end of the affair. I didn’t want to tell them anything more than that because I just knew that I would be then targeted by him.”

Mr Roberts-Smith is suing the newspapers over a series of reports in 2018 that he says portray him as a war criminal and accuse him of an act of domestic violence against Person 17. He denies all wrongdoing. The media outlets are seeking to rely on a defence of truth.

The trial continues.

Most Viewed in National

Adblock test (Why?)

https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMiemh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LnNtaC5jb20uYXUvbmF0aW9uYWwvYmVuLXJvYmVydHMtc21pdGgtcHVuY2hlZC1tZS1pbi10aGUtZmFjZS1oaXMtZm9ybWVyLWxvdmVyLXRlbGxzLWNvdXJ0LTIwMjIwMzIyLXA1YTZ0eC5odG1s0gEA?oc=5

2022-03-22 06:29:35Z
1280015397

Bagikan Berita Ini