‘The older I get, the younger I was’: What’s it like to be the subject of News Corp coverage? 

This article contains explicit descriptions of sexual assault.

It’s an interesting question that I’m unsure how to answer. I am leery of the press in general. All I can tell you is what it has been like to live and work mostly behind, briefly within and sometimes in spite of headlines.

News coverage is fleeting, and only part of the story. It isn’t synonymous with truth. The politico-media industrial complex increasingly resembles an orchestrated, unregulated carnival ground onto which raw facts are dumped, picked over and rearranged to fit the showcase whose narrative runs on an adversarial binary. Holding a disproportionate slice of Australia’s concentrated media market, News Corp is not the exception, but the ruler. It is first and foremost a business. Businesses do not cover people; they commercialise and monopolise products, including human experiences, for profit.

Blowback is part and parcel of public life, especially for dissenting voices. While I did not elect to be in the public eye, having agency is a gift. There is vulnerability, then there is total powerlessness. When I first clashed with the Murdoch press, I was an anonymous child in the raw stages of trauma.

Writing this article warranted rewinding to the very beginning, not that events are hard to recall these days. “The past is not dead, it is not even past,” as William Faulkner put it. I reread articles, school reports, police statements and transcripts spanning a decade; watched archived footage I’d never seen; spoke to friends and family. I even drove to my high school, then walked to a house in West Hobart where some of the abuse took place in the spring of 2010. I had not been there in 13 years. 

A long history with the Tasmanian Mercury

My parents met on set making a commercial for the Tasmanian Mercury in 1993. My paternal grandmother, Valda Tame née Free, got a job there putting catalogues inside circulations overnight before they hit the stands. Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers have always featured loftily in my life, long before they leveraged the local rumour mill that engulfed Collegiate in 2011. Sun-yellowed and stacked high on a wicker chair in my grandparents’ kitchen, they towered above me as a toddler.

Nan loved working for The Mercury. It meant late shifts that ended at dawn, but also independence and financial freedom as a working-class woman. Pop had to pick us cousins up from school because nan would be sleeping during the day. Stray orange earbuds around their home were nan’s solution to both the printing press and pop’s snore, which were probably indistinguishable. Before I started kindergarten, dad dropped me off at nan and pop’s on weekday mornings. I would sit on pop’s lap while he and nan did the puzzle pages side by side. 

A lot has happened since then. A lot remains untold. Looking back on all the coverage from 12 years ago, I am struck by how much has changed, how readily the media played into a predator’s hands, and how long individuals, families and communities take to unravel and heal from complex trauma. The older I get, the younger I was.

On May 23, 2011, news.com.au reported that a then-59-year-old Nicolaas Ockert Bester had pleaded guilty to “possessing child exploitation material” and “maintaining a sexual relationship with a person under the age of 17”. The story ran under the headline “Hobart teacher admits to affair with student”. He was sentenced for both crimes that August. A July court report in The Courier-Mail described his nonchalant confession to “20 to 30” counts of intercourse with a 15-year-old child as a “tryst”. 

The Mercury ran several developments on its front and inner pages throughout 2011, accompanied by pictures of him playing the organ, smiling. “Teacher admits sex shame”. “Jail for sex teacher”. “Guidance ends in sexual affair”. The word “abuse” did not appear once, not even in the body of an article. “Relationship” and “sex”, however, appeared prolifically.

My friend Georgie recalls attending an 18th birthday party soon after one of the local front-page publications. A boy from Collegiate’s brother school, Hutchins, brought a copy of the newspaper with him that he sneaked into as many photo opportunities as possible and carried around like a trophy. 

Recently we have seen global outrage over the non-consensual kiss of a sporting champion. There was no public or even private fury, there were no swathes of outraged editorials when The Mercury uncritically reprinted Bester’s insistence that “she wanted it”, concluding oxymoronically in its July 19, 2011 coverage that “he was remorseful but she was a willing participant”, and they were talking about an innocent child. 

The media sanitise children’s experiences

It is impossible to forget the communal radio silence that reinforced my and so many others’ trauma in the aftermath of a tabloid frenzy. I am grateful for all that’s been done to reform this status quo — it underscored my childhood. But it’s not always about patriarchy. It’s often about what we’re prepared to stomach, and personally sacrifice. Even today, the narrative of a child misbehaving is more palatable than a crime against nature. Mainstream media play a lead role in this.

The media sanitise and adultify children’s experiences, perpetuating a fallacy of democratic fairness. No child can consent to sex with an adult because they are still developing physically and neurologically. This imbalance is not just a legal or social construct. This is a fact of evolutionary biology.

Uncritical reporting is one thing, misrepresentation is another. The abject failure of every masthead to accurately cover this child sexual abuse case — as the media boldly outlined its supposed chronology and offender profile — cast an eerily soft light on evil. If it was worth adding that Bester was a “well-known church organist” from South Africa, surely it was worth adding that he was also a former soldier who fought in the Mozambique Civil War. My friend and fellow student Megan recalls that after she got her septum pierced he told her: “You’re like one of the tribal women I killed.” (To be clear, I’m not alleging that Bester did kill anyone, only reporting that he said he had.)

It would not have taken much digging to uncover every shade of his character. The then-principal’s 16-page police statement documented Bester’s pattern of “demeaning”, “sexist”, “arrogant”, “racist” behaviour and “lack of organisation” as faculty leader, which drew numerous complaints from colleagues, parents and students over the course of her tenure beginning in 2004. He was even reprimanded for running an Amway business using the school’s internet server.

Manipulating the narrative

Child sex offenders seek to infiltrate and manipulate the narrative in many domains: the physical, digital, mental and social conscience. The bigger their reach, the greater their power and the harder they are to track. At every opportunity, Bester flipped the script to apportion blame to me, and The Mercury would dutifully report his claims without questioning them. 

I had not “turned to Bester for advice”. He accosted me one morning in the school courtyard and invited me into his office, where he offered false counsel for anorexia, an illness he claimed he did not know I suffered, despite my six-week absence from his small maths extended class the year prior.

The Mercury also reported Bester’s claim that I told him I “helped deal with stress” by drawing myself naked. Bester inquired on two separate occasions if I had ever drawn myself naked. The first was a suggestion, couched disingenuously as a means to improve “body image”. The second was a point-blank ask to see if I’d reconsidered the prospect. I acquiesced because I felt pressured. As much as 74% of child exploitation material is coerced self-generated content such as this. 

We did not “kiss and cuddle”. He directed me to the empty storage area behind one of the chemistry classrooms. It was dark, eerie, cold and he went in after me so that he was blocking the door. He produced a single yellow sheet of paper that he’d written “yes” and “no” on either side. He is over six feet tall. I am 5’3”. He told me he was the only staff in the school with a key to the adjoining closet, where he instructed me to undress and pass the paper if I was ready. 

I had previously disclosed to Bester, another member of staff and Tasmania Police that around age six I was molested by an older child who also asked me to undress in a closet beforehand. I believe Bester deliberately re-enacted elements of this incident to elicit a submissive threat response. That The Mercury chose to highlight this particular sadistic detail in a red slug line is beyond me. “GIRL, 15, GIVEN CARDS MARKED ‘YES’ AND ‘NO’” ran the words along the front page. “You’re still so little,” he said when he opened the door, studying me clinically in my underwear. He approached me slowly, then pressed his naked body into me, awkwardly. I kissed him because I thought that was what he wanted. 

On August 6, 2011, The Mercury reported that Bester gave me alcohol and we “had sex”. This is false. He attempted to take my virginity on the floor of his office after dosing me with Amarula in a plastic cup, but failed because my vagina froze. Bester took my virginity in the days that followed, after the school athletics carnival. I was wearing my rugby jumper, lying flat on his office floor. My vagina rejected him again because I was scared and tense, but he persisted. The tearing pain was excruciating. I bled. Upon entry he remarked: “I didn’t think we would get that far.”

We did not “have sex” at a Hobart hotel. One school afternoon, Bester drove me to the corner of Goulburn Street and instructed me to wait for 10 minutes before meeting him inside 102 Harrington. He gave me the room number and a black hoodie to wear. After he was finished, Bester asked: “You weren’t into that, were you?” Before I could answer he said, “No matter, we’re going to do it again,” then got up and went to the bathroom. When he returned, I had not moved. He raped me a second time in the same position. 

Bester projected his distorted fantasy into my subconscious through grooming material that glorified relationships between characters with significant age differences. He directed the script physically, sometimes picking me up or carrying me and putting me into different positions during sexual acts, including during my periods, which he enjoyed because they meant he did not have to use protection. These times were particularly painful. To protect his carpet he used a purple towel, which he placed underneath me. Occasionally I would sit on his lap to please him, including at the Wesley Uniting Church in Melville Street, pictured in The Mercury twice in 2011.

Children and other vulnerable people are obedient and apologetic to their abusers to minimise the conflict and pain they are already enduring. Fawning is an instinctive reaction to a superior power. When a person shows us that they are both capable and willing to inflict harm without regard to the consequences, we learn to do anything we can to service their needs. The media should have restated the obvious inequality between us to uphold a duty of care to all survivors of child sexual abuse.

Enabling the offender 

The Murdoch press had a defining role in enabling the offender at the outset in this particular case, but its coverage was as much symptomatic as it was causal of a social failure to understand child grooming. Major outlets regurgitated his defences, the poorly worded primary charge, and the bare bones of an objectively shallow investigation into a deeply distorted, serial offender. Relevant history had been buried by the school and police before it could be found in a courtroom. 

In 2013, aged 18, I moved overseas to study and try to start a new life. Two years later, shortly before I was due to graduate from community college, my mother read in The Mercury that Bester had boasted about his prior offences in a public Facebook post directed towards me. The Mercury alleges it chose not to name Bester at first to prevent re-traumatisation. We were not contacted for comment before his words were on the front pages of the paper beneath bold black typeface announcing a “SEX FIEND CLASS ACTION”.

After being told by one Facebook user that Bester had put him “off men for life”, Bester wrote: “Zip up your testicles in the feminist handbag you sorry little prick. Judging from the emails and tweets I’ve received, the majority of men in Australia envy me. I was 58 [sic]. She was 15… It was awesome!!”

The Mercury’s framing of this development was curious for several reasons. Not least of all its decision to omit the detail that what brought Bester’s past into an unrelated discussion was a link posted by another Facebook user to the May 23, 2011 news.com.au article titled “Hobart teacher admits to affair with student”. The Mercury also omitted his initial response:

“Ah yes. That’s me. So what are you going to do about it? As a matter of fact, I will soon be suing both the court and the girl concerned. So my advice to you is to back off… Consult your lawyers…”

What the Murdoch press chose to amplify throughout this second case was once again reductive and imbalanced in its sympathies towards Bester, whose words were repeated unchallenged. On March 24, 2016, it wrote, “… he told the judge that he was provoked into making the comments — which he maintained were true — and the owner of the Facebook post should have deleted them”, in direct contradiction to the headline, “Regret and remorse part of everyday life, says sex offender Nicolaas Bester“.

The importance of language

The language we use defines our perception. Research shows that words that glorify offenders and/or abuse cause further harm to victim-survivors. Research also shows that perpetrators of child sexual abuse engineer the social conscience in many ways, including through networked distribution of their distorted narratives.

In 2017, commentator Bettina Arndt gave a 17-minute interview to Bester, which she has repeatedly defended, including on Chris Kenny’s Sky News program in early 2020, after NewsCorp’s own #LetHerSpeak campaign (which was all about returning agency and control to abused children, who’d never had any). The clips of the interview played on the episode were of her falsely claiming that “evidence of the girl’s provocative behaviour was presented to the judge” and Bester lamenting everything he had lost.

With respect to the progress that has been made publicly and privately, thanks to monumental survivor-led efforts — including the royal commission, News Corp’s #LetHerSpeak campaign created by Nina Funnell, The Grace Tame Foundation’s harmonised removal of the word “relationship” from child sex offence headings nationwide, and our newfound peace with Collegiate — it is important to clarify the material facts misrepresented or suppressed all these years.

This includes the folder Bester kept on his home computer of other students who were prime grooming targets; students a now-former teacher was tasked with identifying during the police investigation in 2011. My family and I did not learn about this until 2020. When I spoke to this teacher in 2021, they said most of the girls boarded or lived in rural areas away from their support network.

In the late 1990s, this same teacher reported to the school’s management that Bester had been propositioning students for topless photographs for the purpose of breast cancer research. Bester also had topless photographs of young girls, including students, in his possession in 2011. Last year, a Tasmania Police detective told me they could not disprove his claim that he was conducting a breast cancer research study. He has never been charged for these incidents. 

Labouring under its romanticised 2011 narrative was The Mercury’s negligible mention of “self-harm”. While I had a history of anorexia, I had never self-harmed prior to the offending. Bester stalked and surveilled me, frequently turning up to my home late at night, and loitering at the Boathouse Restaurant kiosk where I worked on weekends. Pleasing him was an exhausting performance that involved mimicking his desires on and offline. My employers inquired of my colleague one day if they knew why I might have been crying in the cool room. I let out my growing frustrations at home, where I isolated myself in my bedroom and often fell asleep in my uniform on the floor. My stepfather found me covered in blood one evening. I was hospitalised, medicalised and put on Seroquel after being incorrectly diagnosed with bipolar.

On October 14 last year, I met another of Bester’s former students. She alleges he humiliated and deliberately failed her in two out of four pre-tertiary subjects in Year 11 because she denied his advances on two occasions. She gave me permission to include this story in my book. She remarked that upon seeing Bester’s favourable treatment of another student he allegedly engaged in sexual misconduct with after, she found herself wishing she hadn’t said no.

If cover-up is part of the crime, then so was The Mercury’s coverage. It betrayed me, and by extension every survivor of child sexual abuse. It betrayed the whole community.  

I became a pariah in my own hometown at just 16. At 18, I left the county. The life I led overseas for the better part of six years was less a quest to prove myself and more a relentless hustle to disprove the lasting shame that engulfed me. I am lucky to be here today. My life since 2021 starkly contrasts the gritty years following the abuse. There is a reason survivors of sexual abuse are so called; too many victims don’t make it. 

Some of you might be familiar with the photo of me circulated by the Daily Mail and other outlets in early 2022 that was taken when I was just 19, holding a large pipe for smoking marijuana. As I openly stated a year prior at the National Press Club, as a traumatised teenager I attempted to find solace through several maladaptive coping mechanisms, including illicit drugs and alcohol. I know I am not alone in this. Maltreated children face significantly higher rates of re-victimisation, substance misuse, self-harm and suicide than the average person. For those who are further marginalised, the risks are even greater.

I haven’t had a drink in almost nine months, and it has been much longer since I have taken any substances. Regardless, it’s nobody’s place to judge how others deal with dysfunction and destabilisation, especially children and young people.

There were four people in the room on the night that infamous “bong photo” was taken. One of those people is now deceased. Her hardships are not mine to share, but let this be a warning to anyone who dares weaponise a person’s past against them. In the absence of context, projection, presumption and point mockery will always backfire. 

The unseen context behind the #LetHerSpeak campaign is that before I was able to return home at the end of 2018, six months were spent sleeping on a couch, and for more than a year I was living in an apartment with holes in almost every wall and door. In place of figurative eggshells were fragments of dinner plates that were thrown across the room in front of me in fits of rage. My mother was on the other end of the line when I told her I had been hit in the head, but she was half a world away in Australia.

In December 2019, I was invited to share my story at the annual internal News Corp awards because #LetHerSpeak won the prize for achievement in campaigns. The morning after, a journalist told me that I was only invited to represent the campaign because I was attractive. It was a lonely flight back to America. 

News Corp has a wraparound scheme of shadow government, spread across optically separate — even opposing — factions: Sky News, The Australian and news.com.au. Ultimately this works in its favour because it can gatekeep information and play the outlets off each other. It isn’t always sophisticated or careful, but it is certainly coordinated. Its preferred strategy is to falsely accuse critics and opponents of doing exactly what it’s doing. What it craves but lacks it is prepared to manufacture out of nothing or next to it. It knows that humans often project their preferred narrative into the void, especially if there is a fraction of decontextualised seductive truth to indulge. It knows that desperate minds can be consumed by conspiracy and controlled through blackmail.

To put it plainly, News Corp regularly engages in perpetrator tactics. It creates chaos and then positions itself as the saviour. Cosmetically, the context had changed from The Mercury front pages in 2011 to 2019, but I was still and always will be exploitation material in the eyes of the Murdoch press.

It is heart-wrenching just thinking about everything Bester has done to us, and how much he and other offenders continue to get away with, even when convicted, because of wilful ignorance, apathy and misrepresentation. I did not make it all the way to the West Hobart house when I revisited it for the first time again three weeks ago before I started crying in the street. It is exactly a mile from Collegiate. To think that I used to walk there in my uniform, with my backpack on. When I arrived, the neighbour was mowing his lawn.

“Are you Grace?” he asked. When I confirmed, he thanked me and offered me a glass of water. I politely declined and instead sat on the doorstep, overcome by emotion. For all the pain in my chest, I felt the freedom of a new day. I had forged a new memory to replace the old. Nobody came. His silver car did not pull into the driveway. There was no film. No mattress. No shower. Before I left, I wished the neighbour well. 

This is all children are looking for, to write their own happiness. Please consider this when you are reporting on child sexual abuse.

If you or someone you know is affected by sexual assault or violence, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or visit 1800RESPECT.org.au. In an emergency, call 000.