If anything was going to make her regret reporting it to the cops it was this little man arguing before the court that the whole case was a joke because, as you could clearly see, the victim was no trembling flower, she was a big burly bloke who would have fought him off if it had happened the way she—or is it he? Apologies, your Honour, I’m confused, I think we all are, what was it again?—claims it did.
Sandra returns exhausted from her first day of giving evidence. Rick is lying on the couch watching TV.
‘How’d it go?’ he asks without looking up.
‘Shithouse,’ she replies, fixing them both a drink. And then she says more to herself, in a defeated tone he hasn’t heard from her before, ‘What am I gonna do?’
He peels himself away from the screen. ‘Look, just tell ’em to check out the photographic evidence,’ he says.
‘They have all that already,’ she replies in a monotone.
‘Nah, you know, the photos that the cops took. The ones of the door, you know, where he tore it all off in one piece.’
She tilts her head to one side, waiting.
‘Just tell ’em. “It was solid wood, mate. If he did that to the door, what do you reckon he done to me?”’ And then he turns back to the TV.
For once, he has earnt his keep. The next day she makes Rick’s point in court. The defence requests a brief recess. When court reconvenes, a guilty plea is entered.
‘This guy come bangin’ on the door.’ That’s where she’ll start the story when she tells it thirty years later, her voice absolutely steady: with bone and muscle and flesh on wood and how she knew he was strong from the volume of it. A fist like a horse’s hoof.
The Dream Palace is just another brothel, a small house down a poorly lit street in an industrial suburban neighbourhood ‘away from everywhere’, where she has worked for about three months. It is a Saturday night, mid-May, and the day has gone just like any other Saturday. She started around 10:30 a.m., intending to work a double shift, finishing when they close at 4 a.m. Sunday. By 8 p.m., she has seen six or seven clients. It is just her and Jenny, the other girl working that night. Lucifer, the madam’s large black guard dog, is asleep out the back.
She is between jobs, wearing a full leotard and stockings, sipping tea with Jenny in the lounge room and trying to ignore that banging on the front door. Though her sobs have turned into infrequent sniffs, Jenny is still distraught from her last client, a huge man who choked her. Hearing Jenny scream, Sandra enlisted her client to throw the man out, and he left, carrying his shoes in his hand. But now here he is again, pounding on the door.
‘It’ll be right, hon,’ Sandra says absently to Jenny, huddled at the end of the sofa with her hands wrapped around a teacup. Any type of violence causes Sandra to panic, so the whole thing’s thrown her off a bit, but she’s sure if they ignore him he’ll get bored and piss off like all the other drunk fuckheads. ‘God, we get all sorts in this job, hey?’ she says lightly, looking up briefly from the joint she’s rolling. She is about to lick the paper closed when there is an almighty crash, which is the sound of wood ripping as the front door splinters open. And they both scream, she and Jenny, these women who do not scare easily, and suddenly the man at the door is in the lounge room, so large that he blocks out the light. He grabs Sandra and then Jenny by their hair and at first the pain doesn’t register over the fear as he drags them like rubbish bags down the hallway, growling, ‘If you do what you’re told, you won’t get hurt.’
The improbable name of this man is Mel David Brooks. On this night, he is on bail for previous charges of burglary and aggravated rape. Brooks pauses near the front door where he makes both women kneel low to the ground. He forces them to remove all their clothing. He unzips his fly and removes his flaccid penis. He forces it, again and again, into the mouth of each woman. After a while, he decides that he wants to turn the porch light off. Though she is terrified, Sandra tries to preserve the possibility that a client might come along and inadvertently scare Brooks away. ‘You can’t turn the light off—it’s on a timer,’ she tells him. So he steps onto the porch and looks around for the fuse box. Jenny stands up and he barks, ‘Get back down on your knees!’ Then he turns the power off at the main switch and the house disappears into darkness.
He returns to the hallway, stopping to prop the front door up from where it dangles on one hinge and shove it closed again. The nearest occupied house, another brothel, is at the end of the long street. There is no one to hear Lucifer barking. Sandra is shaking, silently crying. Jenny tries to talk Brooks down. She tells him, ‘Whatever you want, we’ll try to do it.’ He shoves his penis back into her mouth and then into Sandra’s, where he ejaculates. Her stomach lurches. ‘Keep it in your mouth,’ he warns. She is going to vomit. She grabs the towel that Jenny has been wearing and furtively spits into it. The dog is circling them, mouthing at their arms, wagging his tail; now he thinks it is all a great game.
‘Get into the bedroom!’ Brooks shouts at both women. He pulls up the blind so that he can look out over the front yard. He forces Sandra to kneel, and repeatedly and painfully forces his finger into her anus. ‘Lick my arse!’ Brooks says as he turns around and bends over slightly. She can see clearly how dirty he is and, revolted, grabs the towel to wipe him. He warns, ‘Do it properly. Pull the cheeks apart.’ She tries not to vomit.
Jenny is kneeling in front of him. Suddenly he says to Sandra, ‘Now you get in front.’ The women switch places. She is too scared to notice what Jenny is doing, too scared to disobey him although she thinks he will kill them both anyway. The doorbell rings.
‘I’ll go and answer the door, put him in another room,’ Jenny tells Brooks.
‘No, tell him we’re closed,’ Sandra says, thinking maybe the man can go and get help.
‘If you do anything foolish I’ll kill her,’ Brooks warns Jenny as she leaves the room.
Casually answering the door with the shit-stained towel wrapped around her, Jenny gets rid of the caller and returns to the room, where Brooks is demanding money.
Sandra tells him the madam has already collected it. He asks where her car is.
‘We got dropped here, don’t have cars,’ Sandra says, thinking of her car parked out back and the keys in her purse.
Brooks nods. ‘Get dressed, both of you. We’re going for a walk.’ Sandra reaches for her leotard but he allows them only to wear towels. He grabs their hair again and walks them out of the house and across the road into the deserted parkland. They walk for some time, deep into the park, until they come to a cyclone-wire fence and cannot go any further and become just shapes moving on the dark grass; a lion tearing into its prey in the moonlight.
‘Spread your towels on the ground,’ Brooks commands, releasing their hair. He makes both women alternately kiss him on the mouth and suck his penis. Nauseated from the violence and the pain and the terror and the smell of his beastbreath and his dirty skin, Sandra feels even sicker as he repeatedly shoves his fingers into her vagina. She knows from the way he is talking and behaving that her life is in danger.
‘Get in the sixty-nine,’ he tells them. Sandra starts crying again. ‘Don’t worry,’ Jenny whispers to her. ‘It’ll be all right.’ Sandra flinches as he shoves his finger again into her anus. ‘Lick harder! You’re not doing it properly,’ he shouts at the back of her head, which is now between Jenny’s legs. Shaking, she tries to do what he says. She doesn’t know how much time passes as he rearranges them, again and again, like dolls.
She looks up for a moment and sees that he has just ejaculated. She does not hesitate. She punches him in the balls, as hard as she can.
Brooks goes to hit her but she ducks, grabbing his testicles and squeezing them hard with both hands. He just looks down at her. He doesn’t even flinch. Both women start yelling for help but the sound sinks into the night like ink on paper. Brooks darts again at Sandra but this time she fights back. They are struggling now, grappling in the half-dark. He digs his nails into the skin around her right eye. She looks around wildly, sees that Jenny is gone. Barefoot and naked, Sandra struggles to stand up. She throws Brooks off her and when he stumbles, she starts to run.
She runs through shrubs and long grass and gravel and then out onto road; she runs back to the brothel and through the open door and down the black hallway and into the lounge room where, shaking, she feels around the sofa for the phone. Peering into it, she rings triple zero. She hears a thousand noises outside that are all Brooks coming to kill her as she frantically answers the operator’s questions. He tells her that the police are on their way. She hangs up, freezes, listens hard. Hearing nothing, she dials the madam.
‘Fucking get someone here, get someone here,’ she whispers when the woman answers. Hanging up, she feels in the dark towards where she left her purse. Looking, now, down the long hallway through the open door she sees Brooks loping up to the house. She runs down the hallway, towards the room they call the Dungeon, near the back of the house. Before she gets there, the lights suddenly come back on and she freezes for a second as though zapped. Turning, she sees him at the end of the hallway, hulking, enormous, framed by the gaping hole where the front door used to stand and staring right at her. ‘There you are,’ he says.
She races into the Dungeon, throws her purse deep under the bed and grabs a towel to cover herself with and a studded leather strap with a wooden handle; runs out the back door and crouches on the gravel behind her car, looking out for his feet. Lucifer starts barking at her, giving away her location. She hits him with the strap to try to silence him. Then she hears a car pull up outside.
She sprints around the side of the house to safety, whipping her head around wildly to check whether Brooks is onto her. She makes it out the front but it isn’t the police; it’s just another client. She calls out and pounds on the passenger door, but he drives off.
She bolts down the middle of the road, past the factories, towards the other brothel. She is torn and bruised and bleeding, holding her towel up with one hand and fighting for the breath that her terror and her asthma are stealing from her.
Panting, she runs up to the door of the other brothel and starts banging on it and ringing the doorbell. Through the window, she sees the women silhouetted against the yellow light inside. They can hear her pleading to be let in but they do not open the door. She starts begging, ‘Please let me in, pleaseletmein, please…’
A police car pulls up.
‘You the one that called us?’ one of the two officers shouts through the car window.
‘Yesyesyes…’
‘Get inside now!’ he orders, pointing towards the door.
‘They won’t let me in,’ she cries.
‘Fuckin’ let her inside!’ he roars at the women in the window, who only now open the door.
By 3:00 a.m. Sandra has identified Mel David Brooks from photo-graphs shown to her at the police station. By 6:10 a.m. she has given a ten-page sworn statement to the police.
My full name is Amanda Celeste Claire. I am thirty-one years old. That’s where she starts her evidence, ageing herself by gratefully accepting the benefit of her upcoming birthday, still weeks away. The next day Brooks, a thirty-one-year-old machine operator from New Zealand, is located, arrested and charged.
To understand how remarkable it is that Sandra pursued a case against Brooks, you must reflect on a number of things.
The first is her relationship to the police as a transgender woman in the early eighties. At the time of her rape Sandra had witnessed and experienced years of institutionalised police violence towards transgender people. Despite this, she called on the service of the police and explicitly told them, in her statement: ‘I had better mention that I had a complete sex change at the Queen Victoria Hospital. Since then, I have lived as a normal female and have all the functions of a female.’
Then there is her relationship to the police as a sex worker. She was aware of the culture of corruption involving some uniformed police and detectives. When she was the manager of the brothel in Footscray she had paid bribes directly to the police to be allowed to operate. She had knowledge of thousands of dollars in bribes paid to a consorting squad detective by Geoffrey Lamb, the owner of one of the brothels she worked in. Just up the road from Dream Palace, members of the Caulfield police had been the subject of credible allegations that they attended an illegal brothel where they drank and had sex with the workers for free; one such gathering allegedly ended in shots being fired and a sex worker being raped.
In these circumstances, to call on the police for help shows how desperately Sandra feared for her life. But to then proceed with her statement, thereby prolonging her contact with the police, was, in the particular policing environment of the early eighties, to insist with notable courage upon equal justice.
There is also the consideration that she participated in prosecuting her attacker at a time when the equal protection of the law was not afforded to sex workers. Her case was processed three years after Victoria’s highest court held that the rape of a prostitute was less serious than the rape of a ‘chaste woman’. Years before this position was expressly disavowed—and despite being well aware of these prejudices from a cultural, if not a legal, position—Sandra nevertheless insisted on showing up at the County Court and giving evidence at the trial of her rapist.
As countless other rape survivors have found, choosing to make and proceed with a statement means choosing to relive the violence of the rape again and again. Now, there are at least some protections designed to safeguard the mental health and wellbeing of survivors who walk this path. Such measures were unheard of at this time. In addition, Sandra chose to expose herself to this process knowing that she would have to withstand the additional disrespect and embarrassment of having her gender publicly scrutinised, questioned and misunderstood. This was the strange and hateful cost of the basic respect that she insisted upon for herself.
The last remarkable thing about Sandra’s response to her rape was the result. She provided sufficient evidence for her rapist to be apprehended, charged, tried, found guilty and sentenced: six years, with the possibility of parole after four. It was a breathtakingly short sentence given the context of his offending, the prolonged duration of the assault, the infliction of additional violence and humiliation, and his record of similar sexual offending.
But it was relatively heavy when you consider that, between 2010 and 2015, the median prison sentence for a rape conviction was five years and that thirty years ago public attitudes held that raping a prostitute was only slightly more possible than raping your wife. So, yes: Sandra was not only spectacularly courageous, she was also remarkably successful.