The international lawyer who specialises in breaking the silence

I suppose I must look nervous as I wait for my interview subject at Collins Street fine diner Farmer’s Daughters because the kind and attentive staff keep asking me if I’m all right, offering me things to bolster my courage, and assuring me that I look ready. I told the restaurant whom I’d be interviewing when I made the booking, and the sidelong glances make sense: am I really ready to interview international human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson?

I wonder if this is how opposing counsel feel before she enters a courtroom. After all, there are very few lawyers as high-flying as she is, and almost no Australians.

From the small town of Berry, NSW (population about 2000), she became a Rhodes Scholar and has a master’s in public international law from Oxford (yes, that Oxford, and Balliol College, if you’re into that kind of thing). She works in the chambers of Geoffrey Robertson, KC, in his Doughty Street Chambers in London alongside her friend and colleague Amal Clooney. Robinson has had some of the most famous clients in the world, including Julian Assange and Amber Heard.

Despite being one of the most well-known lawyers in the world, Robinson is taken aback when she introduces herself to our waiter, Archie, and he says, “Yes, I know” – he had been worded up when I made the booking.

Is she recognised-in-the-street famous? Only in the immediate aftermath of Assange’s return to Australia in June, she says. “Literally, I’d be sitting there [in a restaurant] and a waiter would come over and say, ‘Excuse me, Miss Robinson, the table over there would like to buy you a bottle of champagne.’ And I’d turn around, and they’d be going …” She grins and gives a thumbs-up. “I was recognised in the street quite a lot to start with after that, but then it died down, and I like that. I like my anonymity. I’m happy to be known for my work and to have platforms to speak about the issues I care about. But I never want to be that.”

A NSW native who now lives in London, Robinson was initially unsure where to choose for our Melbourne lunch. She settled on Farmer’s Daughters because it uses in-season produce sourced directly from Victorian farms, particularly those from Gippsland. Her father is a horse trainer, not a farmer, but it’s close enough – and as a woman from the country, she believes in supporting the little guy.

The restaurant offers a set two-course or three-course lunch, and both of us being more into savoury than sweet, we decide to split two entrees and two mains. For entrees, we opt for cured Lakes Entrance kingfish with red mustard cream and bacon, and Wattlebank Farm oyster mushrooms with artichoke and stracciatella broth. Mains are Noojee Alpine trout with yuzu broth and trout caviar, and a venison loin from Koonwarra with cauliflower.

Robinson says she usually opts for greens as a side and orders the roasted broccoli with smoked bacon and green garlic butter. Archie convinces us to splash out on the mashed potatoes with cultured butter – Robinson thinks it might be too much, but he assures us “no one has ever sent it back”.

We also choose to add on the soda bread with honey butter – this time I do the convincing. I’ve been to Farmer’s Daughters before, and the soda bread, slightly sweet, dense and cakey, lives in my head rent-free, as the kids say.

It’s no surprise that Robinson wanted to support small producers, given that standing up for the little guy is her calling in life. She says the comments she received from Australians after Assange’s return were overwhelmingly positive, but public sentiment was not always on his side during his 12 years in confinement, comprising the seven years he lived in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and the further five in Belmarsh prison. He sought asylum in the embassy because he feared the US would charge him with espionage, which it eventually did.

But many people, including many Australian journalists, did not rally to Assange’s cause until quite recently.

“If you look back in 2010, I remember speaking online, beamed onto a screen into Federation Square, when there were thousands of people out protesting, so to say people didn’t come out for him – they absolutely did,” Robinson says.

“But then there was a massive disinformation campaign to smear him, to say he was something that he wasn’t. He’s not a journalist employed by mainstream media, and he was subjected to a massive disinformation campaign that, sadly, too many journalists fed into, jumped onto and undermined their own rights in the process.”

This question of whether Assange is or was a journalist frustrates Robinson no end. Firstly, she says, he absolutely is a journalist, by any measure. “WikiLeaks was an innovation in journalism, in the way they went about publishing, in the method by which they received information from sources,” she says. “It was innovative and is used by journalists all the time now, but the disinformation campaign went against him.

She says there’s no real way to define the word journalist without including Assange. “He’s written books. He’s written articles … He edits and publishes and works with newspapers on editing and publishing massive stories. Define journalist.” He also has a Walkley Award for outstanding contribution to journalism, she points out.

But the whole debate is a red herring anyway, Robinson says, a way for other journalists to distance themselves from Assange, to comfort themselves that what happened to him could not happen to them. Assange was charged with espionage for revealing confidential information leaked to him from Pentagon and US State Department documents – information that even his most ardent detractors admit did not cost any lives.

He was initially confined in Belmarsh for six months for breach of bail conditions, but after that sentence was served, the next 4½ years were spent fighting the US espionage charge – even though he had yet to be convicted of anything but the bail breach. Finally, in June 2024, he agreed to plead guilty to one count of illegally obtaining and disclosing national defence information, in exchange for his freedom to return to Australia. Jodie Ginsberg, the chief executive of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said the prosecution “set a harmful legal precedent by opening the way for journalists to be tried under the Espionage Act if they receive classified material from whistleblowers”.

Robinson points out that although there is some protection offered to political communication, there are no special rules for rigidly defined journalists where they are not bound by the US Espionage Act, or similar national defence legislation in other countries.

Robinson often advises media organisations that what happened to Assange absolutely could happen to them – and they are relying on the fickle mistress of public relations to ensure that it doesn’t. “How do you advise your clients on the law? You can’t tell them that what they’re doing is not a violation of the Espionage Act. It is, on the interpretation of the US government. We have to tell them, basically, yes, this is a violation of the Espionage Act. But they’re probably not going to come for you.”

Another insidious way the law silences journalists and those who want to speak out in the public interest is in the area of gendered violence and sexual assault, an area of law she has devoted much of her career to, including the infamous Johnny Depp-Amber Heard case.

What somehow got missed, in all the late-night jokes and online hatred, was that this did not start with Heard. Depp brought a defamation case in Britain against The Sun newspaper for calling him a “wife beater”, and Heard gave evidence on the newspaper’s behalf. “We won that case,” Robinson says, spooning some trout onto my plate. “It was one of the greatest, most satisfying moments in my career, when the judge found that that was true. [Heard] had told the truth. He had been violent towards her … I thought, finally, people will stop questioning her. How can they say she’s a liar now? How can they say she’s a liar when we have this judgment?”

Of course, plenty of people did continue to say she was a liar, and one of them was Depp, who sued Heard for defamation in the US for a Washington Post op-ed she wrote about being the victim of domestic violence. Robinson defended Heard in that case also, and Heard filed a counter-claim. In the end, Heard and Depp were both awarded damages, both appealed and ultimately Heard had to hand over $1 million. But Robinson says that Heard lost far more than money. She moved to Spain to get away from the tabloid press and online trolls, and no casting director will touch her.

“She worked hard to be where she is,” Robinson says. “She deserves to have a career, and that’s been taken away from her.”

There is, of course, an example much closer to home of a bruising defamation trial that cost a woman her career, reputation and home: that of Brittany Higgins, who says she was raped in Parliament House.

It was cases such as these and others, in which a woman speaks up about violence or assault, only to find herself at the centre of an ugly and expensive defamation battle, that so struck Robinson that she decided to write a book about it. Co-authored with fellow Doughty Street barrister Keina Yoshida, How Many More Women? lays out the scope of the problem and offers some practical solutions for victims of gendered violence to stop their perpetrators without losing everything.

The Bruce Lehrmann rape trial, of course, was to form one of the book’s chapters – but Robinson and Yoshida ran into a problem.

On the eve of publication, the judge in the Lehrmann criminal case issued stern warnings about media reporting, which made it very difficult to publish background information that wasn’t going to be heard by the jury. Rather than remove the chapter, Robinson and Yoshida decided to redact it – that is, print it with thick black lines over the text, to show readers exactly how the law often prevents victims from being able to speak out.

The Lehrmann trial was abandoned due to juror misconduct after the book was published, but Lehrmann, in a move Federal Court Justice Michael Lee likened to “going back for his hat” after his criminal trial collapsed, decided to sue media outlets that had reported on the alleged assault for defamation. Now that Lee found that to the civil standard, on the balance of probabilities, Lehrmann did rape Higgins that 2019 night in Canberra, Robinson and Yoshida have been able to re-release their book, unredacted.

“We have a system which burdens journalists with the potential cost risk of hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars to defend their journalism and a woman’s truth if they report it, or women face bankruptcy speaking their truth,” Robinson says. “That’s wrong … Brittany Higgins has been caught up in four years of legal action. She’s still being sued. There has been a failed criminal trial, a controversial judicial review into that criminal trial, a judicial review of the inquiry into the trial, 14 separate defamation cases, at least, that I have counted in terms of claims and counter-claims around either her decision to speak out or what came since, ongoing controversy about her employment claim – the amount of litigation that that one decision to speak out has generated, when undeniably that was in the public interest.

“It sparked a movement. It sparked workplace reforms in parliament. It sparked workplace performance across the country, in fact, because of her decision to speak out. But look at what has happened to her as a result. That should not happen to anyone, and we have to start to think about that. What is going wrong in our society if that’s what happens when women speak out in the public interest?”

The law needs to change, I suggest to her, spearing a final piece of perfectly charred venison (Archie was right about the mashed potatoes, by the way, as very little is left).

“The law needs to change, and our culture needs to change,” Robinson says. “Our media needs to change. For example, on the statistics that we know and that we have, if the state had the resources to prosecute and convict every single man who has perpetrated gender-based violence in our society, we wouldn’t have place in our prisons.”

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