The former Special Air Service soldier told the Federal Court last year that his former girlfriend, dubbed Person 17 to protect her identity, was “extremely intoxicated” after a dinner at Parliament House in Canberra in March 2018 and had fallen down a flight of stairs. He said he tended to the bump on her head at their hotel.
Ms Roberts said Person 17 appeared out of the blue at the couple’s home on August 6, 2018, and used the mobile phone of the couple’s housekeeper to call Ms Roberts, who was at the supermarket.
Person 17 described herself as “friend of your husband’s”, Ms Roberts said, and “she asked me to come back to the house”.
Ms Roberts drove home immediately and was confronted with a “crying” Person 17 sitting in the garden with Ms Roberts’ parents, she said.
“I asked her when they had last seen each other, and she said the night prior,” she said.
Ms Roberts said Person 17 showed her text messages between her and Mr Roberts-Smith, and she spent the next three hours reading details of their relationship.
Ms Roberts said Person 17 was “wearing a pink and black dress [and] black shoes” and a “big pair of black sunglasses”. She asked Person 17 to remove the sunglasses and saw that she had a black eye, Ms Roberts said.
She said Person 17 told her that she had fallen down a set of stairs while drunk at Parliament House.
Ms Roberts said she asked Person 17 why she was not going to see Mr Roberts-Smith any more and she gestured to her face and said “because of this”.
She said Person 17 didn’t reply when asked if “Ben did that to you”.
Under cross-examination by Mr Roberts-Smith’s barrister, Bruce McClintock, SC, Ms Roberts agreed that Person 17 said that she had “embarrassed him”.
Ms Roberts told the court that Person 17 told her she had fallen pregnant during the relationship and it was “definitely Ben’s” child, but “she no longer had the pregnancy at that time”.
Ben Roberts-Smith arrives at the Federal Court in Sydney on Monday.Credit:Brook Mitchell
Ms Roberts was initially expected to be a witness for her husband and to say the couple were separated when he started a relationship with Person 17. She told the court the information she had previously given Mr Roberts-Smith’s lawyers was wrong, and she was being pressured by him to lie.
Mr Roberts-Smith told the court last year that domestic violence was “morally reprehensible” and his parents had instilled in him a “very good set of values”. He had no tolerance for anybody who would raise a hand to a woman, he said.
The former SAS soldier has given evidence that he separated from Ms Roberts in late September 2017 and they remained separated for about six months. Ms Roberts said on Monday that this was not the case.
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He told the court that Person 17 told him in April 2018 that she was pregnant and they agreed to terminate the pregnancy. But he said he suspected the pregnancy was not real and he was being “manipulated so that I would stay in the relationship”.
Mr Roberts-Smith launched separate Federal Court action against Ms Roberts on the eve of his defamation trial, seeking to find out if she gave confidential information to the newspapers’ lawyers.
In response to that action, Ms Roberts was ordered to provide certain documents to the court and explain how she obtained them, while the newspapers and their lawyers in the defamation proceedings were subpoenaed for any documents Ms Roberts had given them. Ms Roberts complied with the orders, and no documents arose from the subpoenas.
Mr Roberts-Smith’s lawyers subsequently made an application to have Ms Roberts cross-examined. Justice Robert Bromwich rejected that application. He said many of the assertions made against Ms Roberts had been “shown to be ill-founded”.
Mr Roberts-Smith has now filed an application for leave to appeal against that ruling.
The trial continues.
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Roberts-Smith pressured me to lie about his affair, estranged wife tells court
Source: Philippines Alive
