Not Guilty Verdict Ignored in Feminist-Led Court of Public Opinion

Five years ago, another #MeToo attack bit the dust when one of Australia’s best-known entertainers, Craig McLachlan, was found not guilty of 13 charges of indecent assault and assault. What’s more, the magistrate awarded costs against the police – Victorian police ultimately paid out half a million dollars, which is the highest payout ever against the police in the state.

So, the police paid McLachlan a fat $500k apology cheque – proof that the allegations should never have ended up in court but little compensation for the loss of his glittering career. McLachlan is known internationally for his early roles in television soaps Neighbours, and Home and Away, plus more recently The Dr Blake Mysteries, but also had a huge career in musical theatre and as a musician. He has not had a major gig in the past eight years since the allegations surfaced.

Craig McLachlan has discovered the hard way that in today’s Australia, a “not guilty” verdict means very little in our feminist-led court of public opinion.

Late last year McLachlan was due to be back on stage in a comedy called Cluedo, appearing alongside some other well-known actors. All was going well until an actress took it upon herself to wreak havoc. She took to social media to declare she was “shocked and disheartened” that McLachlan had landed a major role.

Naturally, the online mob roared in, bullied the rest of the cast for daring to share a stage with him and made life so toxic that the producer — displaying all the backbone of a wet paper towel — caved and booted Craig out.

Fuelling the ongoing attacks on Craig are comments made by the presiding judicial officer in the case, Magistrate Belinda Wallington. The woman has quite a reputation as the magistrate who first ordered the late Cardinal George Pell to stand trial and then famously appeared in an ABC photograph with Louise Milligan, author of the notorious book Cardinal, which very effectively poisoned public opinion before the Pell case went before a jury. The unanimous High Court decision dismissing the Pell allegations speaks volumes about the judgement of both women.

Her behaviour in Craig’s case is equally questionable. Having dismissed all the charges against Craig and awarded costs against the police, Wallington then weighed in with some unwarranted asides, describing the four complainants as “brave and honest” and Craig as an “egotistical and self-entitled man”.

Worse still, she threw in a comment about recent changes to sexual consent laws in Victoria, claiming if those changes had been in place at the time of the charges “it is possible that the result would have been different”.

Naturally the complainants seized upon Wallington’s extra-judicial swipes and went to the media claiming the case had been dismissed “on a technicality”. These complainants can’t be named, despite the fact they happily ‘outed’ themselves in the media – appearing in newspaper stories long before going to the police – and have capitalised on their status as sex abuse victims ever since, even after the not guilty verdict.

McLachlan’s partner, Vanessa Scammell has now produced a very successful podcast series, Not Guilty – The Craig McLachlan Case, dissecting all the court evidence showing that the behaviour of the complainants falls far short of Wallington’s praise and exposing her consent comment as thoroughly misleading.

All the allegations relate to McLachlan’s starring role in a 2014 production of The Rocky Horror Show – following complaints made by actresses soon after they discovered they had not been chosen for the show’s subsequent tour with the actor.

Take a look at some examples of the real behaviour of these “brave and honest women”, many of which took place in front of sell-out audiences, all rivetted on McLachlan’s every move: 

• The legendary thigh-tickling caper. One accusation involved Craig reaching up to tickle the complainant up to her inner thigh (while she was perched on an elevated platform). Problem was the physical setup made it comically implausible (he could barely get past her ankle).
• The mid-song passionate smooch. It was alleged that Craig suddenly paused during his big number to passionately tongue-kiss one of the women onstage — even though the scene was choreographed to the split-second with music and lighting cues, giving him roughly zero room to improvise any erotic detours.
• The face-grab fiasco. Witnesses swore blind that Craig grabbed one accuser by the jaw mid-scene and angrily hurled her face aside like a discarded prop. The actual complainant? She shrugged and said the scripted gentle face-touch was just “a little firmer than usual”.

As for Wallington’s comment about new sexual consent laws: there has been a change in Victorian law requiring that the accused person not only has to genuinely believe he had consent but that a reasonable person in the same circumstance would reach the same conclusion.

In only two of the 13 charges was consent law even mentioned as being applicable. One example where consent was an issue involved Craig sitting on a complainant’s lap. Evidence showed lap-sitting was commonplace in the bawdy backstage culture of the Rocky production. In fact, the same complainant had also straddled Craig’s thigh, joking about leaving “snail trails”.

Here the charges were dismissed because the magistrate accepted that Craig genuinely believed she consented. And, given the circumstances, it is a fair bet that any reasonable person in his position would have believed the same. So, even under Victoria’s new consent laws, the result would have been no different.

Wallington’s unwarranted editorial comments were entirely unnecessary to the decision. They were unnecessary comments that she ought to have known would be weaponised to undermine the very verdict she had delivered. In one breath she cleared him – she awarded him costs – and in the next she handed his critics the perfect excuse to misleadingly claim that his acquittal was the result of a mere technicality. The damage has been profound and lasting.

My recent video conversation with McLachlan and Scammell aims to put the record straight – all part of ongoing efforts to bring one of Australia’s finest entertainers back to where he belongs.

As one of Australia’s first sex therapists, Bettina Arndt began her career discussing sex on television and training doctors and other professionals in sexual counselling at a time when such topics were largely taboo. Her current – and even more socially unacceptable – passion is exposing Australia’s unfair treatment of men through the relentless weaponisation of laws and policies that portray women solely as victims. Her decades of advocacy for fair treatment of men in the Family Court included serving on key government inquiries. Bettina makes YouTube videos and blogs on Substack.