The Triggering & the Hurting: Christian Porter Scandal

In case you were living under a rock recently, or you are a passing or just ignorant foreigner, this absurd nation, or the absurd people who run it (the media), has been going into spasms over two sex scandals affecting federal government ministers.

The first one, the Brittany Higgins saga, we will say no more on, as Footiscray boy, or Footscray boy (Melbourne, west) and blogger Ernest Zanatta has described our preoccupation with this vital matter as “inappropriate”, and we’re chastened and stung into silence by this.

That means we have to belatedly get on to the other scandal, which is where Attorney General Christian Porter is accused of having raped a 16 year old girl in 1988, at a debating contest they attended.

What we do know about some of the events, some according to the girl:

• she spent the next day with him
• for the next six years she thought he would marry her
• she claims to have been in a relationship with him for eight years after the rape
• her memories of the rape were “fragmented” until she was referred to a researcher in the field of recovered memory therapy
• she suffered various mental problems and committed suicide last year

There are some rather bright red flags in there. People will often seem to assume that the causation of things goes: the “rape trauma” causes the “mental illness”, whereas it could be that this woman was a wacko from day one and her “recovered memories”, hopes of marrying him, claims of being his girlfriend for years, are all the result of a fundamentally disordered female brain gone insane, as they say. But who knows, and the endless menstrual calls for an “inquiry” aren’t going to solve anything. She’s gone, nothing can be proven.

Once the accusations surfaced Porter employed the services of big shot lawyer Peter Bartlett, from Minter Ellison, and the CEO of the firm, Annette Kimmitt, was unhappy that Porter had been accepted as a client, presumably because he’s a man accused of rape, and law firms should shun such disreputable characters, or something, and in an email to all staff a week ago she said

The nature of the matter is clearly causing hurt to some of you and it has certainly triggered hurt for me.

Reading between the lines, it seems part of her motivation for writing the email was a way of responding to the concerns of younger female staffers at the firm, and as these delicate, sheltered, triggering happy, younger law ladies age and rise up the ranks, it may not be out of the realms of possibility that some law firms will end up refusing certain types of clients, like rapists, even alleged rapists, some day.

Today, a week later, Kimmitt has quit the firm, or been pushed out by MinterEllison chairman David O’Brien, an old white man. Sad!

Meanwhile the conscience of our nation, 2021 Australian of the Year Grace Tame, was also triggered, turbo tongue triggered, upon hearing that PM Scott Morrison had to consider the fact that he had daughters when thinking on the Porter Higgins rape issue:

“It shouldn't take having children to have a conscience.” – Australian of the Year Grace Tame was asked what she thought of Scott Morrison’s use of the phrase “as a father”, referring to a chat he had with wife Jenny, when he responded to allegations by Brittany Higgins #abc730 pic.twitter.com/wlbcjRrGPR

— abc730 (@abc730) March 3, 2021

Don’t forget to clap. Don’t forget to take young women like this seriously, as she speaks at the National Press Club in Canberra. “As a father” is a problematic phrase after all.

Grace is, as one described her in a non-ironical way:

Full of Grace, & don’t bother trying to Tame her. The sip of water really was a mic drop moment.

Ponder on that, especially the sip of portent, also ponder on all these endless sagas of women saying this, and saying that, and we seem to have to fall over ourselves to believe them, whether it’s in this unfortunate woman’s case, or St. Brittany, the 100% Aboriginal academic from the lost tribe, or “Meaghan Merkle” or whatever her name is, as we wait for football season to get started as quickly as possible. Hopefully they’ll actually let us in the ground this year, people need to get in there and yell and stuff.