MARCH 2020, SYDNEY
A magistrate finalised an uncontested Apprehended Violence Order for two years against the Irish Professor under the Crimes Act (Domestic and Personal Violence) three weeks after he criminally assaulted me. He was informed: Most relationships do not include fear, control or violence. You are now part of a minority of people who has one of these orders, and this is recorded on the NSW Police System.
On the morning of 4 March 2020, the first mention of the criminal assault occasioning actual bodily harm, the Irish Professor sat quietly flanked by his lawyer in a crowded and brightly lit courtroom on the fifth floor of the Downing Centre Court in Sydney. I observed from my hard plastic seat in the back row that he appeared surprised to find himself in a local criminal court. Small hands folded in his lap. He was not wearing his Italian suit or soft cashmere Hermès scarf. When arrested, the Irish Professor provided a false address to the police and to the court for his bail because he did not wish to alert the university village to his situation. The university had generously provided him with subsidised, comfortable accommodation on campus when he had previously been homeless.
Eight days after the first court mention, two sweaty, panicked policemen pounded on my front door late at night. They said they were searching for the Irish Professor in response to a concern for welfare job. The Irish Professor had messaged his ailing eldest sibling in Northern Ireland multiple times. He threatened he was en route to a notorious suicide spot and intended to pitch himself off the sheer cliffs into the swirling Pacific Ocean. The constables mumbled apologies for the disturbance. They explained they had been notified by radio that the ‘person at harm’ had a recent address listed at my home. Did I perchance have a telephone number for the Irish Professor that I could share with them?
The Irish Professor was eventually found around 3am on campus in his Allen Jack + Cottier award-winning-designed university accommodation and was spoken to after police visited several times. Apparently, he was nowhere in the vicinity of the ocean cliffs. According to a friend whom he had called earlier that evening, he had enjoyed a productive and long lunch at the Gaelic Club.
His brother wrote: Insofar as anyone dealing with the drama, I think we are sadly used to it now. The second eldest responded: He is planning a visit to some psychiatric hospital tomorrow. Seems to me that when he sends out a message, he is looking for attention and is enjoying everybody else’s discomfiture. Cops have better things to be doing. Enough—a spell in the cold and no further response to self-harm messages. Try watching Dublin Murders instead on television! The constable wearily reported: After a long conversation, the Irish Professor confessed that he had no intention of self-harming, but said he was just looking for attention.
I brought this to the attention of the university village and the university. They did not see a problem with law enforcement searching their affordable student housing for the business school’s fifty-five-year-old funded doctoral student. Neither did the Irish Professor’s PhD supervisor, the dean of the business school, the vice-chancellor or chancellor.
Many months later, a senior police detective wrote to me: I have spoken to a DVLO (specialist officer trained in the dynamics of domestic and family violence procedures). They are aware of the Irish Professor’s history and his vexatious reporting mentality and will liaise directly with me, if need be, should any further incidents arise.
The Irish Professor, by then, had followed the trade winds and moved north to a rainforest hinterland and a new career as a global DJ with a weekly live world music show on a rural radio station. His personal playlist crossing geographical and genre borders appealed to the manager of the pirate radio station. ‘Is it enough to want the beautiful or should you strive for the sublime?’ the Irish Professor asked listeners as he cued Van Morrison’s seduction dirge, ‘And the Healing has Begun’.
APRIL 2020, SYDNEY
On 15 April 2020, the Irish Professor was sentenced pursuant to Section 32. Section 32 of the Mental Health (Forensic Provisions) Act 1990 gives the court the power to divert a defendant into the care and treatment of a mental health professional rather than dealing with them according to the criminal law if they are found guilty of the crime. The Irish Professor was remanded into the care of the Clever Psychiatrist five days a week. This was the same treatment plan he had been following at and prior to the time of the criminal assault. The Clever Psychiatrist wrote a glowing report to the court in support of the Irish Professor. Police advised me that as a ‘Victim of Crime’, I qualified for a ‘Recognition Payment’. This token payment of $1500 would be an acknowledgement from the government that a ‘violent crime’ had been committed against me. I pondered the reams of paperwork that I was required to fill in and was reminded of the Irish Professor’s grant applications. Upon exiting the courtroom, a constable disclosed that had the ceramic garden pot launched by the Irish Professor struck my temple instead of my shoulder and killed me, my family would have received $7500.
The business school at the university rewarded the Irish Professor with ongoing payment for his PhD and a second government-funded scholarship with a substantial tax-free annual income for another three years totalling well over $100,000. Regarding the university’s own published code of conduct: University Expectations of Students: Act honestly and ethically in all dealings with the university and its community, the response provided to me by the acting vice-chancellor: As a general matter, please understand that a student’s personal history is not a barrier to admission to a degree program.
Days later, I came across a tweet from one of the associate professors at the business school bleating her support in less than 280 characters for ‘female victims of abuse’ — by a woman who stayed silent. Silence, too, from the deputy dean (a woman) and chancellor (a woman). I recalled the ‘Aunts’, a class of strict, disciplinary women in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale who work for the Commanders: The Republic of Gilead, said Aunt Lydia, knows no bounds. Gilead is within you. Doctors lived here once. Lawyers, university professors. There are no lawyers anymore and the university is closed.
Every academic who was directly involved with either the failed Trust Project or named as a co-collaborator or a researcher in the Irish Professor’s multiple drafted and submitted applications for lucrative research grants stayed silent in response to my written inquiries. Similarly, my requests to the business school about its process for vetting scholarship candidates and potential breaches of its own code of conduct resulted in bot-like responses: Our Student Charter clearly outlines the personal conduct we expect from our students: act honestly and ethically in all dealings with the University and members of its community. I learned that a curriculum vitae was rarely verified. If somebody had bothered to check, they would have discovered that the Irish Professor was not, as he claimed, an ‘honorary professor’ at an Irish university school of law or a member of a prestigious English university college, as evidenced in Freedom of Information Requests.
The universities were mute about the glowing letters of support, all self-penned, that were included in his drafted and submitted research grant applications. One such ghost-written letter addressed to the CEO of the Australia Research Council carried the signature of a senior university staffer who later admitted to me that she had not penned the rapturous letter. It did not seem to matter that those other self-penned letters of high praise carried the names of the chair of the national corporate regulator, the governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia and the president of Thomson Reuters. Deloitte, too, remained silent regarding their involvement and claims made by the Irish Professor in clever pitch documents, shared with me, of their global accounting firm committing substantial resources of 1.5 million USD to his Trust Project. It was catfishing, academic style. I expect the grants may have caused embarrassment, confided a former captain of industry, his misuse of taxpayer funding was extraordinary, as was the alleged cover-up by universities which is why we need a federal Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC). Another finance professional commented: For my sins of two plus decades in finance, I’ve seen every conceivable sort of bouncer, cad, sociopath and shapeshifter imaginable. I will have to admit this case is right up there with the most brazen.
As a former academic wryly said to me, ‘If you think the Catholic Church is good at hiding and shuffling priests from parish to parish, just try academia’.
*This is an extract from Trust: A Fractured Fable by Jeanne Ryckmans from Upswell Publishing
Jeanne Ryckmans has worked for two decades in Australian publishing as a literary agent and former senior publisher at Random House and HarperCollins Australia. Prior to joining the publishing world, she worked for seven years in arts television (France 2/SBS Television) as an on-air presenter and documentary producer and was features editor at ELLE Magazine and books editor for Vogue Australia. She is the author of three books, her most recent being Trust: A Fractured Fable.