New baffling twist in 'untold' rape case reported this week

UPDATE: Today Paul Sheehan published a column retracting the story about the woman’s gang rape detailed below saying he no longer believes the details are correct.  See his piece in the SMH here. More to come.

Today, veteran The Sydney Morning Herald journalist, Paul Sheehan, dedicated his weekly column to a nurse who says she was viciously and brutally gang raped after a late shift at St Vincent’s Hospital, Sydney, in August 2002.

The column is titled The story of Louise: we’ll never know the scale of the rape epidemic in Sydney and the reaction has been swift and emotional.

Louise (not her real name) told Sheehan she fell asleep in her car after an extremely long shift and was woken by a man pulling her leg.

She says she was then punched in the face, pulled out of her car, beaten, raped, sodomised, kicked and urinated on.

The details of the gang rape Louise recounts are brutal and shocking. And, if this unreported crime transpired in the way reported by Sheehan, it could be one of the most shocking and vicious sexual attacks seen in NSW.

In his column, Sheehan outlines how Louise was visited in hospital by police but due to her extensive injuries, she was unable to speak. The officers said they would come back – they never did. Six months later, in March 2003, Louise says she felt “strong” enough to report the crime and went to Woolloomooloo Police Station to report it. The officer there told her six months was too long to leave the reporting of a sexual crime, and refused to take her statement.

Sheehan reports that the gang rape was perpetrated by men “speaking Arabic”.

“It was August 2002,” Sheehan says in the SMH column.  “Sydney would be rocked by a series of gang-rape trials between 2001 and 2006 but the full notoriety of the problem had not yet peaked.”

Sheehan, who wrote about the Sydney gang rapes in the early 2000s in Girls Like You, says he was approached by a person who told him about Louise after he gave a speech at the NSW Parliament. He met with Louise to hear her story. He checked the facts he could – and they added up. Sheehan says he has no reason to doubt Louise and the details of her brutal rape and the subsequent response by police.

“A couple of homeless guys had seen it,” Louise tells Sheehan. “A lot of homeless sleep down there because it’s near where the food van parks. One of them told me later, ‘I’ll never forget what happened when the MERCS got you. We thought you were dead’.”

“MERCs?” Sheehan asks in the column.

“It had been going on for years and was so frequent it had a name: MERCs. Middle Eastern raping c—-. They would drive around William Street and Darlinghurst and pull prostitutes into the car.”

Commenters and social media have been loud and divided in their reaction to Sheehan’s column and the questions raised. How many similar crimes have not been reported? Why tell this story now, 13 years after it happened? Why tell a story of a crime that has never been officially recorded? Why wasn’t it recorded in the first place? Why did a police officer refuse to take a statement from a person claiming they were the victim of a sexual crime? Why was race mentioned? Why isn’t race mentioned more often?

Sheehan says Louise is right about the big picture of gang rape in the early 2000s.

“The scale of the sexual intimidation of women in Sydney was never assessed,” Sheehan says. “Let alone acknowledged.”

Mamamia contacted the NSW Police but they had not responded to our questions about the alleged assault at the time of publication.

However, if details of the case are accurate as described in Sheehan’s article, it contributes to the question of how many other rapes go unreported. We know that many women do not report sexual assault. And while every sexual assault is brutal and horrific by nature, it’s a shocking idea that crimes committed with this level of obvious violence would go unnoticed.

Women need to be able to report a crime. The day after, six months after, 20 years after.

They need to be able to walk into a police station and have their accusations taken seriously. It’s the courts’ job, not the role of police, to debate that crime.