The defamation trial of Australia’s most decorated living soldier has been told that he was secretly filmed having sex with a lover who was warned the pictures would become public if she did not admit the affair to the SAS officer’s wife.
The woman, anonymised in court as Person 17, gave further evidence about her affair with Ben Roberts-Smith yesterday. She claimed that the former SAS corporal had beaten her after the pair attended a formal dinner at the Australian parliament.
“I was simultaneously in love with him and afraid of him,” the woman tearfully told the Sydney court of her affair in 2018 with the Afghan war veteran, who was married at the time.
Roberts-Smith, 43, was awarded the Victoria Cross in 2010 for valour when he drew fire from Taliban machinegunners so his trapped SAS patrol could escape. He is suing The Age newspaper based in Melbourne and The Sydney Morning Herald for defamation over a series of reports. He alleges they portray him as committing war crimes, including six murders in Afghanistan and domestic violence.
Roberts-Smith denies all wrongdoing.
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The woman told the court she was walking on a beach near her home in early April 2018 when a man she did not recognise showed her photographs of her having sex with Roberts-Smith in a Brisbane hotel room less than a week earlier. The photographs appeared to have been taken through the windows of the hotel.
She said the man had told her to confess to Roberts-Smith’s wife, Emma, about the affair, or the pictures would be made public.
Three days later, she said, she drove to the officer’s marital home north of Brisbane and told Mrs Roberts-Smith of the affair.
The woman claimed in court that she contacted Ben Roberts-Smith hours after being confronted with the photographs but did not tell him about the beach encounter.
Bruce McClintock, the lawyer acting for Roberts-Smith, suggested to the woman his client would have a “lively interest” in photographs of himself engaged in sex.
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The woman replied: “I didn’t trust him [Roberts-Smith] . . . I thought he might have been involved with it.”
McClintock suggested to the woman that there was no such encounter and that the incident with a “mysterious man on the beach” carrying photographs of her having sex with the SAS officer never happened.
McClintock suggested that the woman’s decision to tell her lover’s wife about the affair was a “straight-out act of vindictive revenge”.
“What you really wanted was to end my client’s marriage so you could have him for yourself,” McClintock said. The woman denied this.
The court has previously heard allegations from a serving SAS soldier that he witnessed Roberts-Smith in Afghanistan in 2009 seize an unarmed Afghan civilian and order a more junior SAS member to shoot the prisoner. Roberts-Smith has denied giving that order.
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Another former SAS member told the court that he saw Roberts-Smith drop a second Afghan prisoner to the ground and shoot him with a machinegun in the back. Roberts-Smith is also alleged to have kicked an Afghan prisoner off a cliff and ordered him to be shot. Roberts Smith has denied the allegations.
The trial continues.
