While many Australians have commented on the shocking arrest of former solider Ben Roberts-Smith last week – his ex-wife Emma Roberts has not broken her silence since she testified during his unsuccessful defamation trial four years ago.
“He walked up and I asked him how he’ll ever life with himself,” Emma told the court in February 2022, recalling the night of 6 April, 2018 when she found out Roberts-Smith had been having an affair.
“My life was in complete chaos.”
‘I DIDN’T WANT TO LIE
On April 7 this year, Roberts-Smith was arrested at Sydney Airport and charged with five counts of war crime murder.
It is alleged that he killed or was involved with the killing of several unarmed and detained people in three separate incidents between 2009 and 2012.
Roberts-Smith has denied the allegations since they were first reported on in 2018.
During the defamation lawsuit launched by Roberts-Smith in 2018 against The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Canberra Times, Emma revealed that she found out about the affair with a woman, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, from their housekeeper.
“She was crying,” Emma, who was married to Roberts-Smith from December 2003 to January 2020, recalled when she met the other woman.
“I asked her who she was and where she worked, where they had met, how long they had been seeing each other for.”
When Emma confronted Roberts-Smith about the affair, he told her they needed to claim they’d separated six months before the affair began.
“I didn’t want to lie, there was enough lies,” she told the court.
“He pointed to our children and he said, ‘if you don’t lie, you will lose them’.”
SIGNIFICANT STEP
After 110 days of evidence and submissions were heard, Justice Anthony Besanko dismissed Roberts-Smith’s defamation case, and found that on the balance of probabilities, Roberts-Smith had committed war crimes in Afghanistan.
But, there have been no findings of guilt to a criminal standard against Roberts-Smith.
“It will be alleged the victims were shot by the accused or shot by subordinate members of the ADF in the presence of, and acting on the orders of the accused,” Australian Federal Police Commissioner Krissy Barrett said just before Roberts-Smith was charged last week.
While she said Roberts-Smith’s arrest was a “significant step”, she revealed the criminal case could be challenging as investigators cannot enter Afghanistan.
“We don’t have photographs, site plans measurements, the recovery of projectiles, blood spatter analysis, all of those things we would normally get at a crime scene.
“If you add to that we don’t have access to the deceased, there’s no post-mortem. Therefore, there’s no official cause of death.”
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