Richter is eager to do the same, whittling away a young man to reveal a victim where none had been before, even after the trial has concluded. I was reminded of nothing so much as Michelangelo, who once said that, in order to sculpt David, he had only “to remove everything that was not David”. Richter complains, apropos little, of his own treatment, while advising young Street to “gather whatever strength of character you have to make something of your life rather than to define yourself as a victim and as someone with no agency over your future” (note the virtuosic self-pity and operatically needy hauteur). Among them, Robert Richter QC emerges as one of the more vain, tunnel-visioned, and immoderately foolish – not least in his own words.ĭuring a chapter detailing the trial of a sports coach who groomed a young schoolboy, Paris Street, while working at St Kevin’s College, Milligan reprints parts of a letter that Richter, having acted as defence counsel for the coach, sent to Street post-trial. Yes, multiply: first by their abuser then by their trial and finally by the aftermath of the process – perhaps the abuse whose pain lingers longest.Īlthough she acknowledges that there are counsel ready to engage in cross-examination without eviscerating witnesses, much of the old guard depicted here don’t trouble themselves too much. Through her experience as a witness during the Pell trial, Milligan, who won the people’s choice award in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, learns first-hand how the adversarial system of cross-examination – with its indignities and seething manipulations, its brow-beating and haranguing – visits new traumas upon the multiply abused. Louise Milligan learned firsthand how the adversarial system of cross-examination visits new trauma on the abused.

Witness louise milligan