Some time in the past 15 years – for legal reasons, we are not told exactly when, though a quick google will fill you in – an Australian mother and father were found guilty of child abuse. In a case so horrific it was described by some of those who attended court proceedings as “the worst case of child abuse they’d ever heard”, the father was convicted on 73 counts of child abuse, and the mother on 13 counts. Two of their four children had testified against them.
Enter Richard Guilliatt, a journalist who establishes his authority with the fact that he wrote a book about the Satanic Panic of the 1990s, exposed cancer scammer Belle Gibson as a fraud and investigated Rolf Harris. Guilliatt has questions. And his new podcast, Shadow of Doubt, is the result.
“Could a child be tortured and abused by her parents for 13 years without anyone noticing?” he asks in the first episode. “Would a daughter accuse a parent of such ghastly crimes if they never happened?”
It’s also clear that Giuillatt himself is conflicted, and that his attempts to get to some kind of journalistic truth have failed in a case he says was the hardest he ever investigated
In an attempt to answer these questions – or perhaps to confirm his suspicions – Guilliatt embarks on a years-long journey, interviewing family members, neighbours, medical experts, psychiatrists, lawyers, even a woman who herself experienced repressed memories of ritual abuse that she now says were delusions. There’s a lot to unpack here, and over eight episodes Guilliatt looks at the case from a multitude of angles: the parents’ legal representation, debunked practices for retrieving repressed memories, eyewitness accounts of key moments in the timeline of this case and personal testimony from some of this story’s protagonists.
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Here’s where the biggest problems arise. Guilliatt gets full access to the parents, now behind bars, who offer him numerous interviews presenting their account of events. He also talks to the two of their children who took the parents’ side over their sisters’, and they have plenty to say, though even their versions of events are as subject to perspective as others in this podcast. But the two daughters at the centre of the story decline to be interviewed for the podcast, perhaps unsurprisingly, given the nature of their stated experience.
What that gives us in the end is a lopsided account that markedly misses the voices most central to this story. And while Guilliatt has plenty of convincing material – the repressed memory movement has a lot to answer for, after all – not every blow lands as he might like. Neighbours testifying that the family seemed normal and that they had no suspicions doesn’t establish as much as he seems to think it does: surely at this point we know how well abuse can be kept hidden, even when perpetrated by so-called pillars of the community.
Guilliatt tries to tie all this up in the final episode with a focus on doubt. It’s clear he doesn’t believe we have the full story, and that he hopes to raise reasonable doubt about the conviction. It’s also clear that he himself is conflicted, and that his attempts to get to some kind of journalistic truth have failed in a case he says was the hardest he ever investigated. What we are left with as listener is a traumatic story revisited for unmerited reasons, and a lot more questions. Some of those might be directed at a psychiatric system that failed to support those in need, or at a legal system that does not always give those on trial the representation they are entitled to, but others surround the counter-narratives that Guilliatt himself puts forward. In the end, Shadow of a Doubt falls between two stools, failing to convince us of anything other than the depth of trauma at its heart.
