Australia’s Attorney General Christian Porter has identified himself as the cabinet minister at the centre of a rape accusation – an allegation he strongly denies.
A letter sent to Prime Minister Scott Morrison last week alleged Mr Porter raped a 16-year-old girl in 1988. The woman took her own life last year.
New South Wales Police have closed their investigation into the matter.
Mr Morrison has previously rejected calls for his minister to stand down.
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Mr Porter, 50, said on Wednesday: “The things that are being claimed did not happen.
“Nothing in the allegations that have been printed ever happened,” he told reporters in Perth.
Mr Porter said he had the prime minister’s “full backing” and would not step down from his position, but would take two weeks of leave.
The alleged victim reported her complaint to New South Wales Police last year but did not make a formal statement. The investigation was suspended after she died last June.
On Tuesday, police confirmed they were dropping their investigation because there was “insufficient admissible evidence to proceed”.
Sexual assault cases in Australia typically require an alleged victim’s testimony to proceed with prosecution. That is not possible in this instance because the woman has died.
Mr Morrison’s government has faced calls for a separate, independent investigation into the allegations.
Mr Porter argued that was unnecessary – he said he had never been contacted by police or other parties on the “substantive detail” of the allegations.
“If I stand down from my position as attorney general because of an allegation about something that simply did not happen, then any person in Australia can lose their career… based on nothing more than an accusation that appears in print,” he said.
Mr Porter has been the nation’s attorney-general since 2017 and is currently the government leader of the House of Representatives.
As the chief law officer of the nation, he controls one of the most senior government portfolios and is responsible for legal affairs, national and public security.
The government has been rocked by a wave of sexual assault allegations in the past fortnight.
Brittany Higgins, 26, a former aide to two government ministers, alleged she had been attacked by a male political adviser in 2019. She had later felt pressured to stay silent or risk losing her job, she added.
Her account has inspired other women in politics to come forward with allegations.
Just a fortnight ago, Australia was shocked by a former political adviser’s allegations that she had been raped in the nation’s Parliament House.
Brittany Higgins said she’d been attacked by a male colleague – also an adviser for the ruling Liberal Party – in a government minister’s office in 2019.
Her story has triggered a flood of other women to come forward with their own experiences of alleged sexual assault and harassment in Australian politics.
The most explosive of these – a 1988 rape allegation – now hangs over an unidentified cabinet minister. The minister denies rape, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Monday.
Mr Morrison has referred the case to authorities, but New South Wales state police closed their investigation on Tuesday, citing insufficient evidence.
A rape accusation against an opposition MP has also been referred to authorities.
As the allegations pile up, Mr Morrison’s government in particular is facing a public clamour for answers. Here’s how events have unfolded so far.
Ms Higgins said she was 24 and weeks into a new “dream job” when she was taken to parliament by a senior colleague after a night out in March 2019.
Heavily drunk, she had fallen asleep in the minister’s office before waking, she said, to find the man sexually assaulting her.
The man was sacked in the days following, not for the alleged assault but for breaching office security with the late-night visit.
Meanwhile Ms Higgins told her boss – then Defence Industry Minister Linda Reynolds – that she had been sexually assaulted. The meeting occurred in the same room where Ms Higgins alleged the attack took place.
Ms Reynolds has said she offered support to her aide to go to the police. Ms Higgins said she felt pressure that doing so would lead to her losing her job.
Ms Higgins said she had since felt “silenced” by the Liberal Party, but decided to speak out after seeing a photo of Mr Morrison in January. It showed him celebrating the activism of a sexual assault survivor.
“He’s standing next to a woman who has campaigned [for survivors’ rights]… and yet in my mind his government was complicit in silencing me. It was a betrayal. It was a lie,” she told news.com.au.
PM criticised for response
A day after Ms Higgins came forward, Mr Morrison apologised for the way her complaint had been treated by the government two years ago. He also promised inquiries into parliament’s work culture and support for political staff.
However, he sparked a public backlash when he appeared to suggest that he’d understood Ms Higgins’ experience better after his wife urged him to think of his two daughters.
“She said to me: ‘You have to think about this as a father. What would you want to happen if it were our girls?'” he told reporters.
Women in particular condemned Mr Morrison’s framing of the issue. Did he need to think of Ms Higgins as someone’s daughter, they asked, before he could empathise or take her account seriously?
Mr Morrison and his ministers were also accused of skirting questions about who within the government knew what and when, and why they didn’t do more.
It has since emerged that several people in Parliament House – including at least three cabinet ministers – knew about the alleged crime.
The prime minister maintains he learnt of the allegation at the same time as the rest of the nation.
But when he disputed a suggestion by Ms Higgins that one of his advisers had been “checking up” on her – doubting her recollection in that instance – she was quick in her reply.
In a statement, Ms Higgins said: “The continued victim-blaming rhetoric by the prime minister is very distressing to me and countless other survivors.”
