12 h 10 m, 8 jan 2021 ano - FINANCIAL TIMES Jennifer Robinson The barrister on the vitriol faced by her client Amber Heard

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FROM THE FINANCIAL TIMES:

Jennifer Robinson: ‘Assange had information. That made him dangerous’

The barrister on representing the WikiLeaks founder — and the vitriol faced by her client Amber Heard

By Jane Croft

[Edited to relevant paragraphs only - full article available via the links below]

In the past year, she has barely seen Assange. The pandemic meant that legal visits to Belmarsh, the high-security prison in London where he has been held, have been cancelled. Robinson has also been busy — she represented actor Amber Heard in the high-profile Johnny Depp libel trial last year. She last spoke to Assange on the phone on the morning of our lunch. “There is a Covid outbreak on his wing in Belmarsh, so he can’t even leave his cell to wash,” she says. “Belmarsh is a difficult place at the best of times but through Covid it’s been . . .” — she pauses, searching for the right word — “so incredibly isolating”.

[...]

Robinson was on the receiving end of media intrusion in 2017 after being photographed embracing Seumas Milne, head of communications for then Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. “It was a breach of my privacy,” she says sternly. “I do not talk about my private life and I do not want to start now. I now have a personal experience of what it is like to experience media intrusion and that makes me a better lawyer. Clients appreciate that.”

Such clients include Amber Heard, whom Robinson advised in last summer’s libel trial at London’s High Court. The case was brought by Hollywood actor Johnny Depp, who sued Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper over claims he beat Heard during their marriage. Day after day, Robinson was pictured at the High Court supporting a fragile-looking Heard. Heard received vindication in November when trial judge Mr Justice Nicol accepted that “the great majority of alleged assaults of Ms Heard by Mr Depp have been proved” to the standard required by Britain’s civil courts.

Robinson cannot talk about Heard’s case for legal reasons — the actor still faces a $50m defamation lawsuit brought by Depp in the US — but says Heard’s statement outside court “gave an insight into what it was like for her to be forced to come and speak about some of the most traumatic experiences of her life,” she says. “Amber is one of the most intelligent, hard-working women I have ever met.

“It was a sad reflection to me on our society that a woman who has made domestic violence allegations would require security to come in and out of court,” she adds. “We had people bang on the window of the car as we came through the secure entrance — they would shout at Amber and call her a liar and a gold-digger.”

She talks about the ways in which the law can be used to silence women when speaking about domestic violence. Robinson’s grandmother ran a women’s refuge in Sydney, and she recalls visiting as a 10-year-old, playing with the children and seeing the board in the kitchen where the women divided up their chores. “It made a great impact on me,” she says.

Robinson was “resistant to Twitter for a long time”, but now has a following of nearly 40,000 on the site. “Twitter can be a hostile place,” she says. “The online attacks in respect of Amber have been far worse than anything I experienced during the Assange case.”

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