![The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has been told that NSW government lawyers refused to mediate with victims who were sexually abused at a state-funded foster home. Photo: Jeremy Piper The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has been told that NSW government lawyers refused to mediate with victims who were sexually abused at a state-funded foster home. Photo: Jeremy Piper](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-feed-data/00874b5e-0f5c-4c37-a227-24d66941d1d9.jpg/r0_0_727_410_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
The NSW government's tough, drawn-out legal response to a damages claim brought by 15 victims of child sexual abuse felt like an attempt to "drag out our hurt", one victim has told a royal commission.
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But the NSW Crown Solicitor's Office claims the strategy was in keeping with the state's "model litigant obligations".
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse heard on Wednesday that in the 1970s and '80s girls as young as two were raped and assaulted at the Bethcar children's home at Brewarrina, a state-funded foster home for disadvantaged Aboriginal children.
The main perpetrators of the abuse were the "parents" of the home, Burt and Edith Gordon, and Burt Gordon's son-in-law Colin Gibson, who was eventually convicted of multiple child sex offences.
In 2008, 15 of Bethcar's victims sued the NSW government over the abuse on the grounds that it was responsible for funding and licensing the home.
The commission heard that, over the ensuing five years, lawyers from the NSW Crown Solicitor's Office pursued a tough legal strategy before finally settling the case in April this year.
"I felt like the other side wanted to keep the fight going, thinking that we were going to give up and eventually walk away," one of the Bethcar victims, Kathleen Biles, told the commission.
"It felt like the other side wanted to drag out our hurt. It took so much energy to keep fighting … We just wanted to end it."
After initially attempting and failing to have the case struck out, lawyers for the NSW Crown Solicitor's Office, led by solicitor Evangelos Manollaras, allegedly pursued a limitation defence, arguing that too much time had elapsed between the abuse and the litigation.
It refused to engage in mediation with the victims and their lawyers from the Women's Legal Service until after this question was resolved, thus delaying talks for four years.
Mr Manollaras allegedly expressed the view many times that several of the victims were either exaggerating or even concocting their abuse claims, despite Mr Gibson's criminal convictions.
"Granted I am having a problem with fondling of breasts, but I still think it is a quantum leap, even if there was some fondling of breasts, to conclude sexual interference," the solicitor said in a letter to the barrister hired by the Crown Solicitor's Office to run the case in court, Patrick Saidi.
On another occasion, Mr Manollaras allegedly said he was "... having some difficulty in having understanding of how a jury convicted Gibson".
In an email to an officer from the Department of Family and Community Services, he allegedly raised the possibility of undertaking surveillance on some of the victims, suggesting an initial budget of $20,000 to $30,000 to make this happen.
Mr Saidi allegedly expressed doubt about whether the victims were serious about their claims for compensation, and whether they were actually entitled to it.
He declared in a letter that "one would suspect that some of the plaintiffs would accept any reasonable offer made in these proceedings".
The state finally settled the case in April, agreeing to pay each victim $107,142 and to issue a formal apology. By this point, the state had spent $930,000 of taxpayers' money in legal costs pursuing the case, and it was then required to pay the victims' legal costs – a further $1.24 million.
Mr Manollaras' supervising solicitor from the Crown Solicitor's Office, Helen Allison, is expected to tell the commission that the victims' claims had not been properly pleaded and there was no basis to extend the limitation period.