The surfer, Bomaderry High grad and London-based human rights barrister on the trials of defending Julian Assange, Amber Heard and the world’s disenfranchised.
Robinson turned 40 during the pandemic; lockdown gave her time to write a book, How Many More Women?, which is out next week. Over a year, she and her co-author, fellow human rights lawyer and former Doughty Street Chambers colleague Keina Yoshida, listened via Zoom to stories from survivors of sexual assault, the journalists who wrote about them and feminist activists around the world. They heard story after shocking story about how defamation and privacy law is wielded by “rich and powerful men” to silence women who speak out – and about how those women, even when their claims are vindicated, are further abused by vicious online trolling.
Robinson says the idea for the book had been brewing for some time. “I’d observed defamation cases being filed,” she says, “watched the backlash to #MeToo – you’d be amazed how much goes on that never breaks the surface, that is resolved confidentially and never makes it to court. The result is often that the women are prevented from ever telling their story.
Johnny Depp lost his 2020 defamation case against The Sun because the judge believed his ex-wife’s account of the abuse she suffered at his hands. That didn’t stop Depp’s supporters attacking Heard and the lawyer standing beside her. “I had never faced anything like it before,” writes Robinson, “the trolling was relentless. Everything from my ethics and professionalism to my appearance and my personal relationship history was attacked. Trolls vowed to ‘ruin’ me and make sure I never worked again because … I had proven Depp was a wife-beater.” (In a separate trial in the US this year, a jury found that Heard had defamed Depp in describing herself as a victim of domestic abuse in an 2018 opinion essay for The Washington Post.)
The book was in part inspired by her maternal grandmother, Philipa Cracknell, now 85, who ran women’s refuges in Sydney in the 1980s.
Celebrating Assange’s 40th birthday in 2011, she got talking to a man who turned out to be a philanthropist with deep pockets. “He said, ‘There should be more lawyers like you in the world,’ and I said, ‘Let me tell you why there aren’t.’ And I went on a rant about uni debt, educational privilege, access to networks and mentors. At the end he said, ‘I need a global legal champion and I think you’re going to be it. Come and see me next week.’ ”
In 2011, Robinson became director of legal advocacy at the Bertha Foundation, a South Africa-based social justice organisation founded by the philanthropist she’d met that night, Tony Tabatznik.
Robinson is on the board of the Grata Fund in Australia, a not-for-profit doing similar work to the Bertha Foundation. Its founding director, Isabelle Reinecke, says, “We needed an A-team of heavy-hitters and, with her
international profile, Jen was an obvious choice.”Robinson seems to be getting her feet into the sand in Australia pretty thoroughly. She does not practise as a barrister in Australia but takes on international cases through her London chambers: “I am committing part of my practice to climate change issues and part to First Nations justice.”
Skip to content