The ‘most maligned’ witness in the Christopher Dawson case: Gender,power,media and legal culture in the digitally distributed live-streamed court

Methodology

This article uses the Christopher Dawson trial as a case study of how gender is constructed through a highly mediated court event. It deploys the tools of multimodal sociolinguistic analysis (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001; van Leeuwen, 2005, 2008) to investigate the interactions between a mediatising justice system (Johnston, 2018) and a hyper-mediatised public (Deuze, 2014; Esser and Strömbäck, 2014; Stromback, 2008). Multimodal sociolinguistic analysis includes discourse analysis but draws on the entire field of semiotic resources (words, sounds, gestures, settings, texts, artefacts, still and moving images, etc.) and analyses their use in real-life situations. Unlike research methods that seek to separate language from social context, this study uses multiple data collection methods, including ethnographic field observation, systematic media searching and a close reading of court documents, to generate the multiple perspectives that are crucial to understanding complex social and linguistic phenomena, because language and social context are intricately entangled.

Specifically, the project draws on observations in the author’s field and media diary kept from the first day of trial on 9 May 2022 until the verdict was returned on August 30, 2022. The field diary includes observations taken in the physical courtroom as a member of the public gallery and observations of the court’s video livestream as a member of the media gallery, as well as the real-time flow of media images and stories through these times and spaces. The field notes are supplemented by a systematic media search using Factiva for text-based media and Informit TVNews for television media. Boolean-based search strings were used – ‘Chris Dawson and trial’ in Factiva and ‘‘Chris Dawson’ AND trial’ in TVNews – with the search period restricted from 2 May to 5 September 2022. These dates were chosen to capture preview and round up stories, extending from 7 days before trial commenced to 7 days after the verdict was returned. Results were filtered for duplicates and irrelevant content but some wire service or syndicated stories with headline changes were retained in the sample, as were a small number of news roundups, resulting in a data capture of n = 949 for Factiva and n = 178 for TVNews.

Further, because the media content of Factiva is preselected for certain audiences and is limited by commercial, contractual and copyright agreements, a small number of media texts were manually added to the corpus of works to compensate for some of the more obvious gaps including episodes of The Australian’s ‘The Teacher’s Trial’ podcast (n = 20) and stories sourced directly from the archives of selected women’s magazines, including a cover story from Woman’s Day (n = 1), articles and a podcast from Mamamia (n = 8) and commentary from Marie Claire (n = 2) and Women’s Agenda (n = 1). Moreover, because Factiva is a text-only database housing the linguistic skeletons of what were originally semiotic-rich, multimodal texts circulating in the media sphere, selected texts are additionally cross-read against the original media source and the author’s media diary, to reference graphics, images, layout, prominence and position in a newsfeed. Reference is also made to a handful of pretrial media reports because communication does not take place in a vacuum but is encoded (produced) and decoded (consumed) in the context of prior communication.

Unlike the trial, which was livestreamed on the court’s secure ‘AVL’ (audio-video line) system with a virtual media gallery open to accredited journalists on application to the trial judge, the verdict was livestreamed on the court’s public YouTube channel, where it was watched by 25,000 people in its peak viewing period. A sample of social media circulating with the Twitter hashtag #ChrisDawson was observed in real time using Tweetdeck, and subsequently collected. But only an aggregate, broadly thematic and non-identifying analysis of personal social media is presented, consistent with university research ethics policies and procedures.

Pre Trial: ‘. . . the most egregious example of media interference with a criminal trial process which this Court has had to consider’

Outside the courts, the term ‘mediatisation’ is used to describe the influence of media on social institutions, processes and actors (Couldry, 2008; Esser and Strömbäck, 2014; Hjarvard, 2008; Stromback, 2008). It designates the ways in which media provides the conduit for institutions to communicate with a mass public and acts as an interface for institutions to communicate with one another, as well as intra-institutionally. Use of the descriptor is driven by a broad apprehension that media has become so integral to human life and experience that mediated reality – that is, simulation – may well be the only thing that people have access to in their engagements with the public sphere (Deuze, 2014), including their interactions with government institutions such as the courts. Media technologies are not simply ‘mediators’ of communication in the sense of being a neutral transmitter of messages whose function is to bridge the relation between institutions and the public. Media technologies are systems driven by particular logics that influence the ways in which information is processed and selected and skew the content that is transmitted either to a significant or subtle and relatively invisible degree. In the case of journalism, researchers have extensively documented the ways in which commercial criteria in the marketplace in which news organisations compete for share in an ‘attention economy’ shape the stories journalists write, driving their communication towards dramatisation, confrontainment, personalisation, emotionalisation and spectacularisation (Esser and Strömbäck, 2014). Far less attention has been paid to the ways in which public institutions have increasingly begun to ‘self-mediate’ and ‘self-mediatise’. Media relations and communication activities are higher on the list of priorities for government institutions than in the past – including for the courts – and considerable resources are being invested in digital communication activities. For example, the NSW Supreme Court – where the Dawson trial took place – maintains an extensive website and digital archive (although this is currently primarily directed at the legal profession), employs media officers to engage with journalists and write publicity materials and has established a public-facing YouTube Channel and Twitter account.

Although commercial media cameras are seldom allowed into Australian courtrooms, there has been a revolutionary uptick in the livestreaming of court hearings driven by the Covid-19 lockdowns. However, it remains a criminal offence to record the court’s livestream, or take a screen shot or photograph. Court media officers generally refer requests for access to the court’s livestream to the individual trial judge for approval, and – as in Australia more generally – media reporting rules differ from judge to judge, and jurisdiction to jurisdiction (see, e.g. Schwarz, 2019). Australian courts tend to construct their increase in communication activities as an extension of the principles of ‘open justice’ (e.g. Warren 2014), which is a fundamental attribute of a legal system in a democracy. But digital transparency – as a substitute for ‘open justice’ – can also be more slippery than it first appears.

Despite the rapid changes to courts and court procedures brought about by media technology, research into the relationship of courts and media is surprisingly small. Journalists and media scholars have only just begun to interrogate the impact of digital media on the practices of court reporters (Johnston, 2017, 2018; Keyzer et al., 2012), despite the conflicting dynamics of legal and media industry imperatives (Garcia-Blanco and Bennett, 2021) and the threatened collapse of the media’s traditional ‘watchdog’ function (Pickard, 2019). These shifts in the mediascape are driven by technological and commercial upheavals in the globalising newsroom, which, in the field of court reporting specifically, manifests itself in a focus on high profile crimes and celebrity hearings and a scarcity of reporting in the lower tier courts (Chamberlain et al., 2021). Recent research from a gender-based perspective has included a detailed analysis of the cultural, legal and media industry structures driving news production in specific fields including domestic violence (Blatchford and Morgan, 2020) and sexual violence (Waterhouse-Watson, 2019). But so far, this nuanced field-specific gender-based research has not encompassed the court’s own rapidly expanding media technologies, a theme that has been taken up more broadly in socio-legal studies with a focus on the rapid expansion of filmed and livestreamed court hearings (Johnston, 2018; Moore et al., 2021).

Critical research has also been carried out by legal scholars, although here there is a tendency to focus on individual journalistic errors including the dangers of prejudicial publicity or contempt of court in particular cases, or concerns about the rise of untrained ‘citizen journalists’ or ‘court watchers’ with smartphones (Hews and Suzor, 2017; Reed, 2018). A handful of legal scholars have turned a critical eye on the impact of the court’s livestream technologies on broader human rights concepts such as privacy and dignity (Bernzen, 2018; Biber, 2019a; McKay, 2018), including the way the court’s livestream technologies shape the legal experiences of alleged victims (Smith, 2018) and alleged offenders (McKay, 2018). Others have speculated on the digital future of legal institutions with a utopian zeal, imagining the ‘Court of the Future’ operating in a 3D virtual reality space, in which judges, lawyers, witnesses and defendants are represented by avatars, in the manner of a computer game (Tait, 2017).

R v Christopher Michael Dawson went to trial amidst these technologically driven transformations. It was livestreamed on the court’s secure network, and digitally distributed to facilitate witness and media access from remote locations. It was covered on television, newspapers, magazines, podcasts and social media. It was also preceded by an application for a permanent stay of criminal proceedings on the grounds that ‘egregious’ media publicity had caused ‘irremediable prejudice’ to the accused (R v Dawson 2020 NSWSC 1221), and the trial commenced with an application – supported by the Crown – for a total media blackout of the proceedings (R v Dawson 2022 NSWSC 555).

At the 2020 hearing for the stay application, lawyers for Dawson argued that the media exerts a powerful influence on jurors and witnesses, and that ‘egregious’ publicity stemming from ‘The Teacher’s Pet’ podcast in particular had reached a whole new legal threshold because senior police and legal actors had actively cooperated with the podcast journalist, Hedley Thomas, with one legal actor going so far as to express a public view that Dawson would be found guilty at trial by an adequately instructed jury. Legal actors appearing in the podcast included Dawson’s former solicitor (a Magistrate of the Local Court of NSW, at the time of interview); a former state coroner (an Acting Magistrate of the Local Court of NSW, at the time of interview), and the serving NSW Commissioner of Police, who, in addition to giving an interview, arranged extensive media access to the ongoing police investigation.

According to the judge who heard the application, the case was just one among ‘a large number of cases where a permanent stay of an accused’s trial has been sought on the basis of prejudicial pre-trial publicity’, which she attributed to the ‘advent of new media platforms disseminating news and commentary in repeated news cycles’ which are ‘stored electronically and therefore readily recoverable by the use of search engines’ (R v Dawson 2020 NSWSC 1221, para 395). The judge agreed with defence lawyers that ‘The Teacher’s Pet’ podcast had made it a particularly ‘egregious’ one. She condemned aspects of the podcast investigation for being carried out in what she called a ‘state of ignorance’ (para. 280), labelling the award-winning journalistic investigation ‘uncensored’, ‘overzealous’ and ‘imbued with hubris’ (para 326). Although the judge stopped short of making any legal finding of impropriety against either police or legal actors, or a finding of contempt against the podcast journalist, she bemoaned that the opportunity to injunct the podcast had been lost to ‘history’ (para 445). She concluded,

I am in no doubt that the . . . unrestrained and uncensored public commentary about the applicant’s guilt, is the most egregious example of media interference with a criminal trial process which this Court has had to consider in deciding whether to take the extraordinary step of permanently staying a criminal prosecution (R v Dawson 2020 NSWSC 1221, para 443)

However, the judge ultimately dismissed the application because not to do so would mean ‘trial by media would supersede trial according to law’ (The Queen v Glennon, qtd in R v Dawson 2020 NSWSC 1221, para 361). Appeals to the Court of Criminal Appeal and High Court of Australia were subsequently denied. This judgment, itself the object of a temporary suppression order, was released to the public in 2022, along with a decision by the Chief Justice of the NSW Supreme Court to the effect that – although a jury trial would still be ‘fair’ – a trial before a ‘judge alone’ was more expedient. In addition, the Chief Justice found that trial by judge alone would better serve the ‘interests of justice’ because a judge must ‘produce considered reasons for whatever verdict ensues’ and interested members of the public could therefore satisfy themselves that justice had been done (R v Dawson [2022] NSWSC 552, para 46).

On the first day of trial, the appointed judge dismissed the application for a total media blackout of the trial proceedings, finding in favour of a series of media interveners, including The Australian, ABC, SBS, Seven, Nine, Ten, Sky News and the Daily Mail, who were legally represented for this part of the hearing. According to the trial judge, given that an internet search using the string ‘Chris Dawson murder’ yielded ‘literally several million results’, ordering the suppression of ‘what amounts to a less sensational version of the same material’ – which he anticipated would be set before the court – was ‘effectively futile’ (R v Dawson [2022] NSWSC 555, para 10). Interestingly enough, media coverage of the trial measured by crude volume of stories was almost twice that engendered by the ‘egregious’ podcast. (In Factiva, e.g. the search string ‘Chris Dawson and murder’ yielded n = 860 results across 2018 compared to n = 1480 results across 2022. In TVNews, the search string ‘Chris Dawson’ AND murder yielded n = 101 in 2018 compared to n = 207 in 2022.)

Trial: ‘Okay, we’re back on air’

The Dawson trial took place on the ninth floor of Sydney’s Law Courts Building on Queens Square, a 27-storey 1970s Brutalist-style building just across from Hyde Park. The judge sat raised on a dais, opposite the bar table. Dawson sat behind his lawyers, facing the judge. The layout was atypical for a hearing in a criminal matter. Desks filled much of the room, occupied by solicitors, paralegals and accredited journalists, with a small number of freestanding chairs placed at the back for members of the public, who were – given the publicity surrounding the trial – surprisingly few. Empty bookshelves lined the walls of the court, forgotten relics of the analogue age. A few were stacked with archive boxes labelled with the name of a recent well-known political corruption case, and, oddly, a RM Williams shopping bag. The witness stand ran between the judge’s dais and the bar table, but most witnesses testified via the court’s secure ‘AVL’ network, their faces writ large on outsized monitors suspended from wall brackets at four points of the room. This testimony was livestreamed from geographically disbursed locations, including a police station a 1000km further north, a teacher’s recreation room in Hawaii, an apartment in Montreal, and a purpose-built communications cell in a de-identified NSW correctional facility. Occasionally, a video-line would drop out, or an audio-line fill with static, or a witness move from room to room in search of a better Wi-Fi connection. At odd moments, a stranger’s face would fill the screen, as if accidentally from a cross line – seated in a car, and once, in what looked like a study centre or university library – before the blue screensaver clicked back on with its message, ‘Welcome to NSW Courts’.

Beyond this physical – albeit, digitally distributed – court, accredited media could also access a webcast of proceedings via a secure link to the court’s network obtained from the court’s media officer. Membership of this virtual media gallery – each journalist tagged with their name and that of their news outlet, ‘network TEN’, ‘ABC News’ or just the word ‘MEDIA’ – fluctuated between 20 and 40, depending on the perceived newsworthiness of the testimony in progress. Members of the victim’s family also watched from this virtual space, including the victim’s sister, and one of her daughters, distinguishable by name. Accessed remotely, the computer screen imparts a peculiar sense of digital intimacy to the proceedings, dramatically expanding both visibility and audibility beyond what is normally available from the media or public gallery in a physical courtroom. The virtual space also gives shape to a qualitatively different kind of ‘court watching’, a strange characteristic of which is the observation of court actors – and witnesses, in particular – while they are seemingly unaware that they are being watched. One witness fiddled with her hair and make-up, another called for help from a police officer standing in the doorway. On another occasion, a prisoner shrunk into the corner of his cell, perhaps in the misguided belief that this was outside the range of the court’s camera.

In this way, the virtual gallery transforms the 18th-century idea of ‘open justice’ – predicated on physical co-presence in a shared public space – into an oddly voyeuristic form of one-way viewing. Traditional boundaries – between home, work, police, newsroom, court and penal institution – collapse, generating a new kind of mediated space that is – paradoxically – both intimate and institutional, all at once. On a journalist’s desktop in the newsroom – or the author’s academic office at the end of a busy teaching semester – the judge appears in medium close-up, centrally located in the three-frame gallery view. The barristers’ faces are shot in side-view from the prosecutor’s end of the bar table. The witnesses – particularly those who testify remotely – are disturbingly stark and clear, each strand of hair visible. Occasionally, it is even possible to stare straight through the court’s secure ‘AVL’ network into a witness’s own home, glimpsing an elderly work colleague of the victim’s calmly reproving the defence lawyer during cross-examination, seated in her lemon-yellow living room beside a heritage lamp. Or an ex-Newtown Jets ruby player with alleged links to notorious Sydney criminals, seated on his comfy couch, in his cosy-looking flat, talking to the judge through a flat screen on his coffee table.

This digitally distributed courtroom may look and feel raw and therefore ‘authentic’ but it’s actually carefully staged (Moore et al., 2021). For the media industry, the court’s livestream is well-adapted to the efficient manufacture of news stories in a fast-moving news cycle, allowing teams of reporters to gather and disperse in response to the perceived newsworthiness of the content, allowing stories to be written, subbed, edited, approved and published, without even leaving the newsroom. From a commercial perspective, this is something of a boon, given court reporting is time-consuming, often poorly resourced and legally and technically complex.

In Australia – as in New Zealand, Canada and the United Kingdom (but unlike the United States) – court reporters are restricted to a ‘fair and accurate’ account of the evidence that is set before the jury (or judge alone), which in practice translates to stories largely made up of verbatim quotes, observable facts and a balanced presentation of both sides (Supreme Court NSW, 2016). Court reporters are trained to rise to the challenge of enlivening dense legal argument by extracting a single, discrete or isolated moment from the longer legal narrative of the trial, generally chosen for its colour or drama or confluence with an established set of media industry ‘news values’ (see Harcup and O’Neill, 2017) such as the ‘bizarre and unusual’, the ‘elite and extraordinary’ or the ‘negative and conflict-driven’. Hence, for example, ‘Fortune Teller Twist in Chris Dawson Murder Trial’ (Fife-Yeomans, 2022c), ‘The spectre of notorious killer Arthur ‘Neddy’ Smith hangs over Chris Dawson’s trial’ (Murray, 2022b), ‘Chris Dawson Murder Trial: Princess Diana Casts Shadow’ (Condon, 2022b) or ‘Chris Dawson’s teenage babysitter seen topless in a G-string, court told’ (Sutton, 2022). These headlines are written by subeditors – and not court reporters – but in each of these examples the headline deftly frames the ‘news value’ inherent in court reporter’s lead and story angle, which roughly coincides with the first three paragraphs of an industry-standard ‘inverted pyramid’ story. The first headline speaks to the ‘news value’ of the ‘bizarre’ while the second and third speak to the ‘news value’ of the ‘elite and extraordinary’. What is interesting in these examples is that the story angle does not necessarily present the central thrust of the evidence or legal argument. Instead, the leads and angles serve to magnify an isolated colourful moment, for example, a witness who ‘said hello’ to convicted killer Neddy Smith in an inner-city pub but in reality turned out to be a very minor petty criminal, and a witness who claimed to see Simms on the day the Princess of Wales drove down Macquarie Street on her royal tour of Australia. Each of these stories attempt to connect with its audience by linking the action in the courtroom to something the intended reader already knows – for example, through ‘elite’ people (Neddy Smith and Princess Diana) or ‘extraordinary’ events (Neddy Smith’s gangland murders and Princess Diana’s royal tour). In a similar way, the headline ‘Chris Dawson’s teenage babysitter seen topless in a G-string’ (Sutton, 2022), attempts to connect with its audience through the use of toxic gender stereotypes that are equally if not more familiar to its intended audience as Neddy Smith or the Princess of Wales. This is the gendered dimension of the trial coverage that the next section of the article investigates.

Although some legal commentators have expressed concern that speed and brevity has a detrimental impact on court reporting (Warren, 2014), it is more often the commercial context of news production and consumption that shapes the kind of court reporting that the public gets to read, see and hear. Indeed, speed and brevity are not invariably obstacles to illuminating reporting. With the rise of ‘courtroom tweeps’, for example (a practice, i.e. not routinely permitted in NSW but is allowed in some other Australian states), the 120-character micro-story format has been used to publish some noteworthy real-time observations. ³ For example, AAP’s Karen Sweeney (2022) tweeted the following exchange from a case heard in Melbourne in the timeframe of the Dawson trial: ‘Judge: Amazingly, court hearings are being live streamed. Even more amazingly, people watch them. I wouldn’t be surprised if this one is streamed. (It is and there are 26 people watching.)’ Unlike the judge in Sweeney’s micro-report, the judge in the Dawson case was acutely aware that his court was under scrutiny. ‘You can all relax,’ he said, after a health delay on day 45. ‘Okay, we’re back on air.’

In the lead up to trial, News Corp, publisher of ‘The Teacher’s Pet’ podcast, announced it would be taking advantage of the relaxed reporting rules that are the tacit accompaniment of a judge alone trial to push the long-established boundaries of court reporting practices in Australian criminal jurisdictions. The resulting podcast – called ‘The Teacher’s Trial’ – accumulated almost half a million listeners every month as the trial unfolded (Madigan, 2022), with a new episode dropped at the end of every sitting week. Because Hedley Thomas was on the witness list and therefore legally unable to observe the trial until after he gave evidence, a chat-cast segment with journalists Matthew Condon and David Murray – who were reporting daily from the media desk in the physical courtroom – formed the dramatic centre of each episode, with Claire Harvey, presenter of News Corp’s daily podcast ‘The Front’, hosting the conversations. The episodes were intercut with edited segments from the original ‘The Teacher’s Pet’, interviews with legal experts, dramatic readings of court transcripts by voice actors, occasional archival news, commentary from Hedley Thomas and increasingly, as the trial progressed, audio recordings that had been admitted into evidence, including telephone intercepts and records of police interrogation.

Unlike traditional court-reporting’s focus on extracting discrete or isolated moments, the polyphonic format of ‘The Teacher’s Trial’ podcast gave the audience a stronger sense of the adversarial back-and-forth of courtroom argument, including what the prosecution was trying to prove, and what the defence was doing to counter it. The roomy nature of the podcast supported the explication of legal tactics and styles of advocacy – which were not always favourable to the lawyers concerned – and pithy explanations of court procedures that are often incomprehensible to audiences outside the legal world. Although the legality of podcast was repeatedly questioned by the defence over the course of the trial (see, e.g. Wells, 2022), the podcast’s polyphonic structure tended to make biases clear. Ironically episode 1 ‘Court’ commenced with a dramatised reading of the judgment on ‘egregious’ pre-trial publicity (R v Dawson 2020 NSWSC 1221), which had just been released into the public domain, including the judge’s less than flattering assessment of the podcast journalist. However, such is the peculiarity of linguistic communications that are intrinsically directed at a particular audience or community (see, e.g. Fish, 1980; Fish and Jameson, 1989), the verbatim reading – directed towards the journalist’s particular public – positioned the reporter as a hero, weathering harsh judicial criticism in the interests of his community. In an interview with rival media outlet the Sydney Morning Herald, Thomas made this meaning even clearer, saying: ‘Many of the comments and criticisms in the judgment are in my view a powerful reminder to journalists why it is important as ever to not take editorial tips from judges’ (Baker, 2022).

Media, Law and Gender: ‘. . .making up her evidence to get revenge and get rich’

In episode 3 of ‘The Teacher’s Trial’ – called ‘Bruises’ Hedley Thomas introduces the week’s courtroom coverage by saying: ‘What happens in the trial, sadly is . . . the person who is at the centre of this can end up being the person least talked about’ (Thomas, 2022). And yet, in the media sphere, the opposite was in fact occurring. Whatever the particular story on the particular day – in print, television or online – it was accompanied by photographs of Simms, smiling in her wedding gown, gazing fondly at her children or cradling a baby on the beach – behind her, in the picture, waves stretch into the distance and a cloud of salt mist hangs in the air. On the first day of trial, all the Sydney television networks ran a selection of these photographs, either as a banner backdrop behind the newsreader or as an overlay cut into the court report. Network TEN feather-brushed a montage of bridal photographs, in nostalgic black and white, to accentuate their romantic, dream-like quality (Sully and Hogg, 2022). Nine News featured a cut-out photograph of a 73-year-old Dawson, encircled by a ghostly montage of a young Simms in faded pastels, mobilising the cultural connotations of light and dark, youth and innocence, to generate a visual theme of good and evil (Overton et al., 2022). Meanwhile, the ABC’s banner backdrop placed the snapshots in a graphically imagined family photo album, rendering the gendered social script of the white middleclass family clearer (Phillips and Cornish, 2022).

Juxtaposed against the court reports, the photographs infer that an adherence to normative ideologies of gender, marriage and family are reasons to expect greater immunity from domestic violence. Hence, the words, sounds and images combine to initiate a wider narrative of betrayal. This narrative is generalised and projected onto a larger national canvas through constant gesturing towards mythic versions of the suburban dream – shot through with the peculiar resonance that the beach has as a culturally resonant space in Australian culture (see, e.g. Morris 1992). The northern beaches location of the crime is ubiquitously referenced, either directly in the words, or through images of the family’s home and swimming pool, or the beachfront bushland around Northbridge Baths, where Simms had arranged to meet her mother the night before she disappeared. Framed by a narrative about the Australian dream’s betrayal, the court reports allocate a powerful sense of blame and blamelessness.

These meanings are also gender encrypted. In court reports, Simms’s identity is frequently sketched in through the use of descriptors such as ‘loving mother’ and ‘doting mother’. While these terms have a positive aspect in that they allow Simms to occupy an identity outside that of murder victim, they also position her within a traditional gender discourse of feminine virtue. In western culture, this discourse is historically marked by race and class. It is endowed with an established repertoire of attributes, including – to draw from a list compiled by Lauren Rosewarne – being ‘stable, emotionally secure, kind, forbearing, supportive, contented, giving, feminine, beautiful, pure, chaste, noble, self-sacrificing, self-abnegating, self-restraining, and self-denying’ (Rosewarne, 2009: 44). This encryption is so familiar to media audiences that the descriptors ‘loving’ and ‘doting’ – when applied to a female figure – are sufficient to unleash a chain of connotations. In the media, Simms is often called by her first name at ‘second mention’. This industry practice is designed to aid communicative clarity while allowing her to occupy an identity that is separate from her husband’s. But it also crafts a sense of intimacy that adds yet another layer to the contours of meaning. In this way, the discourse of feminine virtue inscribed in media coverage of the case generates a powerful sense of moral wrong that is rightly directed at Simms’s convicted killer. However, this gender-inscription simultaneously works to shift a sense of blame onto the equally familiar cultural figure of the ‘Other’ woman. Hence, the witness known as ‘JC’ is encoded as Simms’s cultural opposite. She is positioned – to draw again from Rosewarne’s list – as ‘promiscuous’, ‘heartless’, ‘self-involved’ and ‘nasty’ (Rosewarne, 2009: 54).

This victim-blaming narrative was already entrenched in pretrial reporting. For example, in unethical reporting by the Daily Mail (White, 2018), a photographer was sent to watch ‘JC’s’ house for days on end, covertly photographing her at the self-service checkout in the supermarket, pushing a pram in the park, carting grocery bags, talking on a mobile phone and carrying a coffee cup. The Daily Mail even photographed ‘JC’s’ adult daughter, standing beside a car, a startled expression on her face. In the accompanying report, ‘JC’ is described in language that evokes criminality, such as being ‘holed up’ in her home or ‘come out of hiding’, actions that construct a sense of guilt, furtiveness, shame (White, 2018). Nine News trailed ‘JC’ down a concrete drive, describing her as ‘keeping mum today’ as if she had something to hide (Overton et al., 2018). The top-rating news show A Current Affair challenged her on a public street, demanding accountability: ‘Can I ask you a few questions about Chris Dawson? . . . Can you understand why people would like to hear your side?’ (Grimshaw and Allen, 2018).

Even when Dawson was subsequently charged with the 1980s child sex offence of ‘carnal knowledge’ and a class action was mounted against the NSW Department of Education, several high circulating newspapers ran headlines that diminished the gravity of the alleged offences, or else inferred that ‘JC’ had financial motives. For example, ‘Teen Sex Charge’ (Murray, 2019), or the syndicated page one story ‘Sleazy Schools Compo’ (Hennessy, 2018a), and ‘Teen Sex Payout – Pupil Sex Payout Looms’ (Hennessy, 2018b). It should be noted that the last two headlines, written by subeditors, did not reflect the gravity or seriousness of the reporter’s chosen lead and story angle.

The themes of shame, blame and greed persisted in the trial coverage up until the verdict was handed down. Multiple stories implied vindictiveness, nastiness and promiscuity through the reporting of ‘JC’s’ alleged petty behaviours, such as cutting Simms out of family photographs (e.g. Harris, 2022; McPhee, 2022b), tying Simms’s daughters’ ponytails too tight (e.g. Thomas, 2022) or the frequently reported failure to wear a bikini top as a school student (e.g. Sutton, 2022; Zemek, 2022). Some reports also made use of gender-toxic labels that diminish the seriousness of alleged child sex offending, such as ‘teenage lover’ (n = 116), ‘teen lover’ (n = 19), ‘schoolgirl lover’ (n = 40) and – startlingly – ‘spurned teenage lover’ (n = 1, this being a newswire story republished at least five times in national, metropolitan and regional papers across the Eastern states). Similarly, reports repeatedly blamed the victim by describing the 16-year-old ‘JC’ as ‘topless’ (n = 48), with many of the ‘topless teen’ references appearing on days when ‘JC’s’ bikini was not in evidence. Other stories repeatedly referred to an older ‘JC’s’ ownership of a G-string (n = 66), a detail extracted from testimony about coercive and controlling domestic violence (later evaluated as credible by the trial judge), with a significant number of reports using both descriptions on days on which neither the G-string nor bikini were relevant.

The use of victim blaming labels is additionally disturbing in the court reporting context because the fact that ‘JC’ was a child at the time of Simms’s murder should have been at the forefront of reporters’ minds, given media outlets were legally obliged to follow suppression orders requiring witnesses who were children at the time of Simms’s murder to be designated by pseudonyms. The judge also incorporated the full text of Dawson indictment on the historic charge of child sexual abuse in his first published judgment, released to the public on day three of the trial (R v Dawson 2022 NSWSC 555, para 3).

In more diffuse ways, court reports frequently constructed ‘JC’ as blameworthy using binary linguistic devices that positioned her as a dramatic foil to Simms. This was frequently a by-product of the dominance of ‘conflict’ as the key ‘news value’ shaping the stories. Take, for example, the sentence ‘Hired to look after the Dawsons’ two little girls, JC would swim topless in the swimming pool of the family’s house’. Here, the word ‘topless’ condemns the 16-year-old as promiscuous, while the binary conflict that underpins the sentence constructs her as duplicitous and treacherous, inferring she is guilty of abusing her employment as a babysitter to undermine the family. Here, the family is encoded as innocent through the image of the ‘two little girls’ (Murray, 2022a). A different binary looms large in the headline, which reads, ‘Dawson called wife ‘fatso’ while having sex with teen’ – effectively condemning the ‘teen’ as much as it condemns the convicted killer. In fact, in text-based court reports, one of the most frequent labels used to designate ‘JC’ is the term ‘babysitter’ (n = 665), which, given the binary structures driving so many of the news stories, functions much like the ‘topless in the swimming pool’ story, as a cryptic encoding of betrayal.

More obviously, media coverage of ‘JC’ – and evidence relating to ‘JC’ – tended to rely on the defence’s allegations against her (as opposed to coverage relating to Simms which mostly drew on evidence led by the prosecution). The defence’s cross examination of ‘JC’ largely revolved around the gender stereotypic claim that ‘JC’ had fabricated her testimony for reasons including, but not limited to, anger, revenge, greed, being scorned, being spurned, attempting to manipulate the outcome of a family law dispute, attempting to make money by selling her story to the media, attempting to make money by writing a sensational book and attempting to make money by maximising damages in a class action against the NSW Education Department. Some court reports led with the defence’s allegations directly, as demonstrated in the headline, ‘Ex-lover tailored evidence to implicate Chris Dawson in disappearance of his wife, Lynette, court hears’ which is followed by a lead paragraph that startlingly encodes an alleged victim of child sexual abuse as a ‘spurned teenage lover’ (Bolza, 2022b). Or else, ‘Custody battle behind ‘slurs’ Chris Dawson was involved in his first wife’s disappearance, court hears’ which leads with the defence’s allegation that ‘JC’ is ‘bitter’ and ‘nasty’ (McKinnell, 2022). Other stories presented the defence’s claims through the lens of ‘JC’s’ denials, but nonetheless relied on gender stereotypes for the overarching story angle, as demonstrated in the headline, ‘Dawson’s ex-wife not on a ‘mission to destroy’ him’ (McPhee, 2022a). Of course, court reporters who led with ‘JC’s’ denials were up against the limits of their craft. Given that the defence’s cross examination based on toxic gender stereotypes ran for two days, the conventional rules of court reporting left them few alternatives but to report on what they saw and heard. Here, the real problem is a legal culture that deploys toxic gender stereotypes as powerful heuristic devices – that is, as an alleged explanation for facts and evidence, an alleged substitute for facts and evidence or an alleged factor affecting witness credibility – as if toxic gender stereotypes were a legitimate form of knowledge (for a wider discussion, see, e.g. Craig, 2014; Levit, 2006; Nelson and Lumby, 2021).

On the nightly television news, toxic gender stereotypes either led the coverage or else framed it. On Seven Network, for example, day one of ‘JC’s’ testimony was sensationally introduced by a newsreader sitting in front of a banner backdrop that read ‘Sex Slave’. ‘Chris Dawson’s former schoolgirl lover has told his Sydney murder trial how she became his sex slave . . .’ the newsreader announced. The bulletin cut to a story package featuring Seven’s court reporter chasing Dawson down the street, repeatedly asking, ‘Have you ever kept anyone as a sex slave?’ The reporter then rounded off his story with a piece-to-camera saying, ‘More than once it was put to the witness [‘JC’] that she was making up the allegations of domestic violence as part of her campaign to destroy Chris Dawson . . .’ (Ferguson and Batten, 2022) Interestingly enough, when the defence resumed their cross examination next morning it appeared to reference the television news, alleging that ‘JC’ was narcissistic, attention-seeking and only testifying to make herself famous. ‘It’s pretty sensational stuff for a book, isn’t it, to say you’re a sex slave?’ That night, Seven News again framed their story with the defence’s case, announcing:

Newsreader [female]: Chris Dawson’s former teenage girlfriend was grilled in the witness box today over her claims to have been his sex slave.Newsreader [male]: Dawson is on trial for the alleged murder of his wife Lynette, and this key witness is accused of embellishing her account.

Cut to reporter on the steps of the Sydney Law Courts Building.

Reporter: She’s the former schoolgirl lover of Chris Dawson accused of making up her evidence to get revenge and get rich.

(Usher, 2022)

‘JC’s’ denial of the defence’s allegations is only briefly mentioned. Instead, the story cuts to news footage of the reporter chasing ‘JC’ down the street: ‘Were you trying to destroy Chris Dawson? Were you really kept as a sex slave?’ Overlays cut into the court report similarly give greater prominence to the defence’s accusations over the witness’s denials. One overlay features the defence barrister’s photograph, a grainy replica of the picture found on her chambers’ website, accompanied by a short extract from the court transcript, which is authoritatively voiced by the reporter: ‘You have reinvented your life with Mr Dawson with the intent of destroying him unfairly’ (Usher, 2022).

Similar angles appear in most media outlets, including normally progressive ones, mostly because publications such as the Guardian – where a gender-critical perspective might be anticipated – did not allocate a staff reporter, but relied on purchased AAP wire copy for their coverage.

Almost inexorably, the negative media presentation of ‘JC’s’ evidence laid the groundwork for the airing of the speculation that ‘JC’ – and not Dawson – had engineered Simms’s murder. ‘Bombshell claims,’ Nine News reported, above the story lead, ‘Sensational claims have been made at the murder trial of Chris Dawson, as his identical twin Paul points the finger at his brother’s schoolgirl lover’ (Genders, 2022). ‘Chris Dawson’s brother Paul tells court babysitter had ‘more to gain’ from Lynette’s death,’ the ABC reported on a similar note (Cornish, 2022). Meanwhile, the Daily Telegraph ran with the headline ‘Dawson’s teen lover ‘had motive’ to kill Lynette, twin claims: court’ (Fife-Yeomans, 2022b), which was republished in a range of News Corp outlets in pithier forms, such as the Brisbane Courier Mail’s ‘Babysitter ‘had a motive to murder’’ (Fife-Yeomans, 2022a). This last report – featuring surprisingly high levels of linguistic modality – relied entirely on Dawson’s twin brother’s testimony to the effect that ‘If anyone had a motive it was [JC]’ and ‘If Lyn had been murdered, JC had the motive. . . [she] had more to gain and she did gain more than Chris’, in addition to a third-party allegation that ‘JC’ had said she would ‘get rid of [Lynette] . . . do away with [Lynette]’. This report is so unbalanced that a formulaic clarification has been worked into the copy halfway down, stating ‘JC has never been charged with any wrongdoing’. As a standard industry practice, sentences of this sort are often dropped in by news editors or subeditors during a copy-check to keep a story on the safer side of ‘fair and accurate’, which is not just a requirement of court reporting (Supreme Court NSW, 2016) but an element of the ‘qualified privilege’ defence to defamation in all Australian states.

However, much coverage of ‘JC’s’ testimony was also politically polyvalent, mobilising a range of discursive repertoires, all at once. For example, the headline ‘Chris Dawson’s schoolgirl lover stands firm in face of defence grilling’ (Condon, 2022a), positions ‘JC’ in a credible frame, even though it deploys the toxic ‘schoolgirl lover’ label. In the story, taken from The Australian’s multi-platform coverage, the journalist describes ‘JC’s’ testimony as a ‘relentless blitzkrieg of often emotional and raw evidence’, producing his own contemporaneous transcript of evidence to illustrate the point.

Here, the defence is attempting to minimise, normalise and romanticise child sexual abuse allegations by situating the alleged teacher-student interaction within a paradigm of consenting adult relationships (for an analysis of this trial strategy in a different legal jurisdiction, see ‘Romantically Interested in a Schoolgirl’ in Nelson and Lumby 2021:119–150). And yet, even as the contemporaneous transcript of evidence supports a critical reading of the defence’s trial strategy, the journalist almost immediately neutralises this criticism by encasing the story within a gender stereotypical narrative that – as the reporter puts it – ‘had it all: a schoolgirl lover, declarations of love from teacher to pupil, sex, infidelity, betrayal, allegations of revenge’ (Condon, 2022a). In this way, the journalist ends up reproducing the toxic gender discourse that had apparently so disturbed him in the cross-examination.Later, the same reporting team would obtain a longer extract from this cross examination, including it in episode 17 of ‘The Teacher’s Trial’, published a few days before the verdict. The transcript reads:

Here, the defence persists with its strategy of romanticising alleged child sexual abuse by describing the teacher student interaction as ‘he fell in love with you’ and ‘you fell in love with him’. It subsequently deploys the strategy popularly known as DARVO (an acronym for Deny, Attack and Reverse Victim and Offender), putting it to the witness that Dawson was the real victim because the 16-year-old student had ‘chased’ the teacher.

Only one witness, a former student at Cromer High, managed to cut through the problematic courtroom narrative pursued by the defence and breathlessly reproduced in many sections of the media. This time the defence (as recorded in the author’s field diary) put it to the witness that because Dawson was ‘good-looking’ that school students – with a contextual reference to students as young as 14 – fantasised about him. When the witness responded in the negative, the defence alleged, ‘You didn’t like him, did you?’ Followed by, ‘He wasn’t your type.’ Here, the words ‘like’ and ‘type’ carried sexual connotations, which the defence deployed in an apparent attempt to support a toxic narrative that child sexual abuse victims are drawn to offenders and that perpetrators – driven by temptations they allegedly cannot control – are the real victims. ‘He was a teacher,’ the witness replied, cutting off the attack. ‘But pupils get crushes on teachers, don’t they?’ the defence persisted. ‘No, teachers preyed on students,’ the witness replied correcting the record.

This testimony was widely – albeit sensationally – reported. ‘Student prey,’ Network TEN announced, ‘a witness at the Chris Dawson murder trial has made a bombshell claim in court, saying teachers at Dawson’s school would routinely prey on female students’ (Sully et al., 2022). ‘Chris Dawson did not have a ‘relationship’ with schoolgirl but allegedly molested her, murder trial told,’ ran AAP newswire in The Guardian and other outlets (Bolza, 2022a). Curiously, these stories ran as if the abuse allegations were new, or only recently uncovered, instead of the subject of an ongoing taskforce investigation since 2018. This police investigation named Strikeforce Southward was a direct result (and arguably the central achievement) of the journalistic investigations carried out in ‘The Teacher’s Pet’ and, of course, the many former students who bravely stepped forward to share their stories.

Court Adjourns: ‘I assert . . . journalists should not be using the phrase “teenage lover” to refer to JC’

Beneath the surface of the mainstream media, a very different kind of conversation was going on. On social media, a small but steady stream of objections to journalists’ use of toxic gender stereotypes appeared, coalescing in a counter-narrative that was clear to anybody watching this subterranean space. Objections – often from accounts identifying as belonging to young women – could be seen in blogs and comment boxes, podcast review pages and on Twitter. The counter-narrative was so conspicuous that it eventually surfaced in the mainstream media, featuring in an interactive audience segment of ‘The Teacher’s Trial’ podcast dropped two days before the verdict was returned.

In this episode – entitled ‘Anticipation’ – Claire Harvey announced that ‘The Teacher’s Trial’ team had received feedback from media audiences ‘on all sorts of different platforms’ objecting to the language they had used to frame the coverage. She read an extract from an email sent to Hedley Thomas, which touched on issues raised in an earlier episode in which journalists in the chat-cast segment had inferred ‘JC’s’ testimony was unreliable. In this earlier episode - entitled ‘Grooming’ journalists had questioned ‘JC’s’ use of the term ‘grooming’ – labelling it a ‘very contemporary’ term that was anachronistic to the social context of early 1980s. Because ‘JC’s’ application of the term was necessarily ‘retrospective’, the journalists inferred that it must have been ‘imagined’. They summed up ‘JC’s’ testimony by saying, ‘JC also repetitively said and reminded the court, I was only a child, I was a child, I was a child.’ Here, the word ‘repetitively’ does not imply consistency – which is associated with honesty in the popular imagination – but works to cast doubt on the credibility of what is being said. The journalist’s triple repetition of the phrase ‘I was a child’ therefore invites the audience to be sceptical of what is essentially a factual claim (although the trial judge would later find that these words also had ‘metaphorical’ implications’, discussed below). In the email, the writer – identified as a woman named ‘Anna’ – continues:

The reporters mentioned that JC consistently corrected the word relationship being used in court by substituting it with grooming. This is completely accurate. . . . I assert The Australian and its journalists should not be using the phrase ‘teenage lover’ to refer to ‘JC’ – language matters. And I encourage those involved to think carefully about the way in which JC is described.

The problem, as Anna points out, is that such labels work to normalise alleged child sexual abuse and stigmatise survivors. To his credit, Thomas conceded that his understanding of the dynamics of sexual abuse was ‘evolving’. He conceded using the term ‘teenage lover’ on ‘multiple’ occasions, saying, ‘I now don’t feel very comfortable about that’. Harvey also apologised and invited survivor advocate Nina Funnell onto the podcast, who explained how this language ‘minimises’, ‘sanitisers and it romanticises’ what is going on.

In this way, the stage was set for a dramatic narrative shift. Later, this shift would become so pronounced in media coverage of the verdict that Guardian commentator Badham (2022) would sum up the trial coverage by alleging ‘JC’ had not been styled a ‘teenage lover’ by the media since 2003. Sadly, such wishful thinking is not sustained by any analysis of the facts.

The Verdict: ‘One of the Dawson trial’s most maligned witnesses . . . ‘

On the day the verdict was returned, journalists began gathering in Queen’s Square in the small hours of the morning to ensure they got a seat in court. The proceedings had been moved from Court 9D to Court 13A, which only had a capacity of 42 under Covid rules, resulting in queues. Instead, a livestream feed was relayed on screens in the Banco Court adjacent, with a seating capacity of 250. More significantly, the verdict was livestreamed on the Court’s public-facing YouTube channel, where it was watched in real time by 25,000 members of the public. The court sat at 10, and for the next 5 hours – including a lunch break – the judge explained his reasons, detailing his evaluation of the accumulation of circumstantial evidence that led him to a seemingly inexorable conclusion that Simms had died on or about 8 January 1982, and that she had been murdered by her husband.

Not unexpectedly, the judge took a different view of the evidence compared to the mainstream media. Remarkably – that is, for a member of a male dominated Australian judiciary that has been criticised for its culture of ‘institutionalised sexism’ (e.g. Appleby, 2020) – the judge stated in the early stages of his reasons that he was deeply conscious of the need to reject gender stereotypes related to evidence about Simms. ‘Men seem not to be regularly stereotyped for making arguably irrational or selfish decisions,’ he said, ‘whereas women are somehow expected to abide by a higher standard’ (R v Dawson [2022] NSWSC 1131, para 240). He similarly found ‘JC’s’ evidence to be ‘truthful and reliable’ (para 232), saying, ‘I found that JC’s insistence during her evidence that she was at the time only a child to be an evocative description of her predicament with wider metaphorical implications’ (para 233). Although the exact meaning of the word ‘metaphorical’ in the context of a legal judgment is perhaps contestable, in popular discourse the judge’s use of the word draws together a range of ideas – about youth, innocence and the not unproblematic discourse of protection – that collectively comprise the cultural imaginary of childhood. The judge’s words therefore stand in stark contrast to Dawson’s treatment of his then 16-year-old student, and, indeed, the media’s construction of ‘JC’s’ evidence over the course of the trial.

With an apparently keen eye for what nonfiction writers call ‘telling details’, the judge states – this time in the longer published version of his reasons – ‘every Friday night’ from mid-1980 onwards, ‘Mr Dawson would pick [‘JC’] up and drive to Manly. He would stop at a convenience store to buy her chocolate and they would have sex in his car . . .’ (para 172). Here, the detail about the chocolate treat and the inclusion of the honorific ‘Mr Dawson’ – which, although it is used inconsistently throughout the judgment, here functions to evoke the mode of address that school students use to address their teachers – forces the reader to inhabit the child’s point of view. Of course, a legal judgment cannot be analysed as if it was just like any other text but here the language works with harrowing affect, a point that is also raised by The Teacher’s Trial reporting team. The judge also found that Dawson’s ‘obsession’ with ‘JC’ continued long after Simms’s murder, manifesting itself in Dawson’s ‘controlling behaviour’. He writes, ‘. . . although not directly related to the question of his guilt, [this behaviour] remained manifest after their marriage, as supported by JC’s evidence . . . ‘. This evidence included the so called ‘G-string incident’ that had been salaciously reported. The judge elaborated Dawson’s coercive control of ‘JC’, finding, ‘Dawson even monitored the places she went, the girlfriends with whom she mixed and the style of clothes that she wore’ (para.737).

In the virtual gallery beyond the physical courtroom, interested members of the public discussed the verdict on social media with #ChrisDawson consistently trending as the verdict unfolded. Over 9,200 posts were published across all platforms in the course of the five hour livestream, with most engagement reported in the 18–24 years age range and 53% of contributors self-identifying as women (Media Week, 2022). On Twitter, the preferred platform of professional journalists, this younger demographic was also active. Here, the judge’s finding about Dawson’s ‘prior good character’ before the murder – a reference to the absence of criminal convictions – triggered a series of colourful exchanges, mirroring the ‘audible gasps’ (Gans, 2022) reportedly heard in the public gallery. Although mainstream media accounted for most of Twitter’s social media reach, with the ABC’s early calling of the verdict gaining the highest traction on most measures, the influencers profoundly shaping the conversation – that is, accounts consistently registering the highest number of ‘Replies’, ‘Likes’ and ‘Retweets’ – were self-identified as young and female. Tweets registering high levels of engagement included a discussion of the judge’s rejection of gender stereotypes, a discussion resulting in a call out to members of the legal profession to change the terminology they used to describe people of ‘good character’, overtly feminist discussions, including discussions about sexual assault, sexual abuse and ideas around sexual consent and ‘grooming’.

The mainstream media wrapped up the day’s coverage by calling the verdict a ‘testament to a brave babysitter’, declaring, ‘One of the Dawson trial’s most maligned witnesses – JC – was on Tuesday vindicated in the convicted murderer’s verdict hearing’ (Condon, 2022c). After the verdict, the Guardian assigned a staff reporter, who immediately summed up ‘JC’s’ testimony as ‘stark’ and ‘chilling’ (Bucci, 2022), in contrast to earlier newswire reports published in the same outlet. Women’s magazines also leapt to publish once sub judice restrictions were lifted, with sympathetic angles appearing under headlines such as ‘JC is the other victim’ and ‘The Other Victim in the Dawson Case’ (Bath, 2022).

Dawson has appealed the conviction and continues to maintain his innocence.

Conclusion

This article set out to investigate the cultural construction of gender in a highly mediated, globally publicised Australian murder trial. Using the tools of multi-modal socio-linguistic analysis, it focused on the cultural construction of a key female witness, including by legal actors in the courtroom, and subsequently by court reporters in the media sphere. It mapped the emergence of a victim blaming narrative in relation to alleged child sexual abuse that was an underlying theme in pretrial reporting, a central feature of the defence’s trial strategy and a dominant focus of the media’s trial coverage. This toxic victim-blaming narrative worked to normalise and romanticise child sexual abuse by placing child sex offences on a continuum with consenting adult relationships, stigmatising the alleged child sexual abuse victim by casting her as the ‘Other woman’, and linking the case to a wider mythic narrative or set of social fears related to attacks on the nuclear family and the betrayal of the suburban dream.

Although this analysis is restricted to a single witness in a single case, the new and complex forms of visibility the article describes might also be read more widely against the backdrop of the global #MeToo movement, and associated activism, which has focused public attention on a slew of high-profile legal actions with similarly gendered themes. Beyond the Weinstein case itself, international examples include the successive civil defamation actions launched by actor Johnny Depp against his former partner, Amber Heard, with different results. In Australia, examples include the Geoffrey Rush and Craig McLachlan defamation cases (with civil proceedings in the later case interrupted by an unsuccessful criminal prosecution), and more recently the discontinued prosecution of Bruce Lehrmann for the alleged sexual assault of his then co-worker Brittany Higgins in Australia’s parliament house. This last case is currently the subject of an independent inquiry, and a further two defamation actions have been initiated against journalists in relation to media coverage of the criminal case. Although these actions have been fought in different countries and across civil and criminal jurisdictions, they share common themes. This includes an allegation of gender-based violence made by a highly visible female witness, and, at the centre of the trial, a defence cross-examination designed to throw doubt upon the witness’s credibility and portray her as a liar. Significantly, in each stance, gender stereotypes were mobilised in the courtroom to achieve these ends, irrespective of whether these tactics are successful or otherwise.

This analysis of the Dawson case suggests that the mobilisation of gender stereotypes in the courtroom - popularly known as #MeToo backlash - is far from new (see, eg. Biber 2019b; Jones and Wardle, 2008; Middleweek, 2017; Milligan, 2020; Robinson and Yoshida, 2022; Simkin, 2013; Smart, 1989). Rather, changed media technologies have brought a new kind of visibility to a longstanding problem. As Quilter (2022) noted with respect to the Lehrmann case, while the attacks on the female witness in the public realm appeared to reach a whole new threshold, the attacks the witness faced inside the courtroom were ‘sadly, not unusual at all’.