Ben Roberts-Smith’s ex-mistress claims the war hero forced her to take a pregnancy test in front of him after she had miscarried and faked having an abortion.
The woman, known as Person 17, told the Federal Court on Tuesday she learnt she was pregnant while on a holiday with her husband and their children in Europe.
Person 17 is giving evidence for Nine newspapers in the high-stakes Federal Court defamation action brought by Mr Roberts-Smith.
Nine has accused Mr Roberts-Smith of committing or being complicit in the murders of six unarmed prisoners during his service with the SAS in Afghanistan and also of punching Person 17.
Mr Roberts-Smith has denied every war crimes claim made by the newspapers but is equally insistent he did not assault Person 17, or would ever hit a woman.
Ben Roberts-Smith’s defamation trial has taken another turn as his onetime mistress gives evidence about their tumultuous affair. Mr Roberts-Smith is pictured with his wife Emma Roberts, who has dropped the Smith from her surname
Nine has accused Mr Roberts-Smith of committing or being complicit in the murders of six unarmed prisoners during his service with the SAS in Afghanistan . It also alleges he punched Person 17 after a function at Parliament House. Mr Roberts-Smith is pictured outside court
Person 17 has described her tumultuous relationship with the Victoria Cross recipient, which began in October 2018 at a time he says he was separated from his then wife.
She wept loudly during long stretches of her testimony, which included claims Mr Roberts-Smith had punched her in the face after a dinner at Parliament House.
Person 17 said the pair had come together at a time both their marriages were failing and they had quickly fallen in love.
‘Initially I didn’t think it was really going to be anything,’ she said. ‘It was really fast moving and I would say sort of all-consuming. It was like we couldn’t get enough of each other.
‘He said to me that he wished he’d met me 20 years earlier before he met his wife. That he didn’t want to stay in an unhappy marriage for the rest of his life and he wanted to start again and get it right.’
Person 17 said when she told Mr Roberts-Smith she thought she was falling in love with him he said, ‘you don’t want to fall in love with me, I’m not the greatest guy’.
She had thought he was just being humble, ‘because he seemed to me to be perfect at that point.’
Ms Roberts has said she suspected her husband of having an affair during a difficult period in their marriage in late 2017 but he repeatedly denied it. ‘He would constantly be taking selfies of himself and I knew they weren’t for me,’ Ms Roberts told the court
Person 17 said she would meet Mr Roberts-Smith in hotels and the pair had discussed plans for a future together but she believed he was still with Emma, his wife.
‘As far as I knew they were still together but they’d been having problems,’ she said. ‘That’s what he told me and he was often in communication with her in my presence.’
Mr Roberts-Smith has said it was ‘absurd’ they had discussed marriage and denied he had bought Person 17 a pink Argyle diamond engagement ring which he later gave to his wife.
Person 17 said she had been concerned when Mr Roberts-Smith accused her of flirting with an old school friend at one of their clandestine meetings.
‘I was really upset because I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong,’ she said.
Four months after they had begun an affair, as Mr Roberts-Smith was trying to break off the relationship, Person 17 had taken a pregnancy test and it was positive.
‘I knew that the father was Ben because I had not slept with anyone else including my husband and in any case my husband has had a vasectomy,’ Person 17 told the court.
Mr Roberts-Smith has said he had a six-month affair with Person 17 while he was temporarily separated from his then wife. Ms Roberts has said there was no short-lived separation and she did not know of the affair until it was over. The former couple is pictured in London in 2012
Person 17 had spoken to Mr Roberts-Smith on the phone from Europe but had not told him she was pregnant because he had his own problems.
She said Mr Roberts-Smith told him he was drinking two to three bottles of wine a night, was taking medication for depression and thought he was an alcoholic.
‘After he’d unloaded all of that on me I just felt I couldn’t,’ she said.
She had told him she was pregnant a week later on the phone. ‘He was surprised initially and he said, you know, “Well, were going to have to deal with that when you get back to Australia”,’ Person 17 told the court.
The next morning she said he told her, ‘Why are you telling me this now? I’m going to want some proof of that.’
Person 17 eventually agree to a termination but later had second thoughts.
‘He started to get angry with me for just my indecision and failure to do anything,’ she said. ‘He said you need to do something about this now. He said if I kept the baby he would not stick around long-term.’
Person 17 booked an abortion at Greenslopes Private Hospital in Brisbane for March 12 but said she miscarried before the appointment.
Ms Roberts has told of her confrontation with his mistress when she revealed their affair to him on the front lawn of the marital home. Emma Roberts said she spent three hours reading texts between the lovers
‘We had been fighting so much during that week,’ she said. ‘After I told him about booking in for the 12th there were a couple of days where he just didn’t return my calls. I couldn’t contact him… I was in a really bad place.’
Person 17 said she had not told Mr Roberts-Smith she had miscarried and went ahead as if she was having the abortion, but changed the date to March 6.
‘We had just been fighting, the situation was really tense, he wasn’t returning my calls. I thought that was better so I could tell him about it face to face.’
Mr Roberts-Smith has said he did not believe Person 17 was pregnant at the same time he was trying to break off their relationship.
‘I just didn’t like the timing,’ he told Justice Anthony Besanko last June. ‘It didn’t make sense to me. I believed I was being manipulated for a number of reasons.’
Mr Roberts-Smith asked private investigator John McLeod to follow Person 17 to Greenslopes.
Mr Roberts-Smith had an affair with a woman known in the trial as Person 17 from October 2017 until April 2018. He claims he separated from his wife in September 2017 but Ms Roberts says that never happened. This picture was taken on December 31, 2017
When Person 17 met up with Mr Roberts-Smith at a hotel after attending the hospital he showed her a video Mr McLeod had taken and said he knew she had not had an abortion.
Person 17 said Mr Roberts-Smith then made her take a pregnancy test, which didn’t work. He then went to a nearby shopping centre, bought another test, and this one came back with a false positive.
‘He said, “What’s happened?”‘ Person 17 told the court.
She then claimed she had undergone the abortion somewhere else. ‘I just knew that all he cared about was that I wasn’t pregnant anymore.’
‘He said, “You better be able to show me proof of that. I will get the CCTV”. And I was just crying and I told him what had really happened.’
Person 17 said when she told Mr Roberts-Smith she had miscarried he was at first sympathetic and understood why she had lied but then turned against her later in the night.
‘He said to me things like, you know, that he was a good friend to have and not someone I would want to get on the wrong side of,’ she told the court.
Mr Roberts-Smith wrote to Person 17 on Boxing Day, 2017: ‘Your amazing, you make me feel like I never have before.’ ‘Em is feeling my lack of affection, it’s getting pretty obvious, it makes me sad but I have fallen for you and there is just no other way to describe it.’
Person 17 claimed Mr Roberts-Smith knew she had not flown to Brisbane for the abortion appointment early in the morning as planned because he had access to the Virgin flight manifest.
Later in the day Person 17 broke down repeatedly as she described him punching her in the face after the pregnancy-abortion-miscarriage debacle.
Person 17 told the court she had attended a dinner with Mr Roberts-Smith in the Great Hall of Parliament House held on March 28 and hosted by then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull.
The pair had been drinking earlier in the day during lunch and she had continued drinking at the dinner, where she was seated at a table near her lover.
‘I was quite drunk by the time we left,’ Person 17 told the court.
Mr Roberts-Smith had gone ahead of Person 17, who hit her head when she fell down a flight of stairs leading to an underground carpark.
Ben Roberts-Smith is suing three newspapers including The Sydney Morning Herald over claims he is a war criminal, bullied comrades and punched a woman in the face
The lovers then got into a car and were driven to a room at the Realm hotel after Mr Roberts-Smith had declined the driver’s offer to take Person 17 to hospital.
‘When we got inside the room Ben got really angry with me,’ Person 17 said. ‘He was sort of up in my face, just against the doorway and he was shaking me by the shoulders, and he said, “F***, what the f*** have you done?”
‘He said, “What have you done?” He said, “You were all over the other men at dinner. They’re all going to know we’re having an affair.’
Person 17 said Mr Roberts-Smith said he should have left her at Parliament House.
‘He said, “I let you into my world and I trusted you and you just treated it like a high school formal”,’ she told the court.
‘I was saying that I was sorry. I knew that I had behaved badly at the function and I knew that I was drunk. And I said to him, “My head’s hurting, can we please just go to bed, just forget about it?”
Person 17 said Mr Roberts-Smith had been pacing around the lounge area of the room, getting increasingly angry. She held his hand and again said she wanted to go to bed.
‘When I said that my head was hurting he said something like, “It’s gonna f***ing hurt more” or “I’ll show you hurt”, before he punched me,’ she told the court.
Mr Roberts-Smith and his mistress Person 17,declare their love for each and discuss plans for the future, while Mr Roberts-Smith also admits at the height of the affair he was also still sleeping with his then wife
Person 17 said Mr Roberts-Smith punched her with his right fist on the left side of her face and she back on an ottoman.
‘I just lay there still because I didn’t know what he was going to do next,’ she said.
The next thing Person 17 remembered was waking up and going to the bathroom. She said Mr Roberts-Smith followed and watched her use the toilet.
‘I said, “My head hurts, I want to go to the hospital” and he said, “No, you’ll be fine, I’ll look after you, its OK”. And we went back to bed.
‘And then later in the night we woke up and we had sex. And afterwards he was just holding me saying, “It’s going to be OK” and I was just apologising to him and saying I loved him and how sorry I was.’
Person 17 said the next morning her face was badly bruised. She further claimed Mr Roberts-Smith had shown her pictures he had taken of her while she was naked in bed, which he has denied.
On December 30, 2017, Mr Roberts-Smith told Person 17 he had still been sleeping with his wife. ‘To answer your question yes I have, I know she feels bad for ignoring me and admitted to just giving up on that side of things’
Person 17 said the pair had agreed to say she sustained the injury to her face in the fall earlier in the evening, which is what Mr Roberts-Smith insists is what actually happened.
‘He said, “Good girl, you hurt yourself when you fell over”,’ she told the court.
Mr Roberts-Smith has said he did not believe Person 17 needed to go to hospital and he had regularly checked her pulse and breathing as he stayed up all night.
He agreed he had taken photographs of Person 17 with an ice pack on her face but denied taking pictures of her naked body while she slept in their bed.
‘No, and that’s disgusting,’ he has told the court. ‘I have never done anything like that and never would.’
He has further denied waking Person 17 to have sex with her that night, or that she kept apologising for her behaviour at Parliament House.
‘We didn’t speak and we certainly didn’t have sex,’ he said.
Mr Roberts-Smith denied he had been angry with Person 17 but said he was ‘annoyed and frustrated’ because he believed she had behaved disrespectfully at the dinner.
Person 17 did not claim Mr Roberts-Smith had hit her until she spoke to Nine journalist Nick McKenzie two months later. A complaint she made to police was withdrawn.
Mr Roberts-Smith left his wife on January 20, 2020 and settled their divorce in February 2021. He is pictured with his girlfriend Sarah Matulin attending the Magic Millions together on the Queensland Gold Coast in January last year
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