AN HONEST MISTAKE

So much for being honest. So much for trying to tell the truth and not sound like a hypocrite. In recent days I have supported a sacked teacher who – before he even took up the calling – had a relationship with a teenager. Under our new, and generally applaudable laws within the Education Department, he got caught in the net and got fired.

His sister wrote a letter to a newspaper explaining that sexual fondling did take place but intercourse did not. It happened when he was twenty and he is now in his thirties.

He would not seem to be a risk to students. I defended him. And keep in mind I have been to jail for fighting paedophiles. Especially a Catholic priest who raped children as young as ten.

But, in a radio editorial defending the teacher, I made an admission that has pilloried me in recent days. One tacky newspaper ran the headline “Hinch Humbug” and a second story under the headline “Grubby affair. I had sex with girl 15 admits Hinch”.

And then the Herald Sun’s tough rightwing columnist Andrew Bolt came after me under the headline: “Hinch: Call the cops now.”

This may seem self-indulgent and self-justifying but I believe it is worth explaining.

I said, on radio, I had a problem because, inadvertently, I was guilty of a similar crime to that of the sacked teacher. An adult having a sexual relationship with an underage girl. And I had confessed and detailed it in my book, The Fall and Rise of Derryn Hinch. The papers didn’t pick up on it then.

I didn’t, and won’t, name the girl. I met her at a party at Molly Meldrum’s house about three o’clock in the morning. I recognized her. I had seen her in lingerie ads in magazines like the Women’s Weekly. She was exotic. European. Absolutely gorgeous. The ads were full of lace and cleavage and nipples and g-strings. And I thought she was about 25. Obviously this was a long time ago. Around thirty years ago in fact.

We did not go home together that night. She was more interested in a famous rock star.

But we went out together days later. We ended up in bed. The next night we went to dinner and, frankly, I genuinely thought her lack of knowledge – and struggling current affairs conversation -- was because English was obviously her second language. And she had not been in Australia very long.

At dinner, I mentioned actor Warren Beatty – and pronounced his name the way he does: Warren Batey because his sister Shirley MacLaine was an acquaintance of mine through Andrew Peacock. My date looked bewildered. I then repeated it as “Beatey” and she still looked bewildered. Suddenly the penny dropped. She was too young to have heard of him.

I asked her, too late I’ll admit, how old she was. She may have been a professional model wearing lacy bras and knickers in colour spreads in the Women’s Weekly but she was only fifteen. And what we had done the previous night was obviously illegal.

And I could have been arrested and could have been charged with unlawful carnal knowledge. Even statutory rape. And my media career could have been ruined the way that the career of teacher Andrew Phillips has been destroyed.

Any follower of my career would know that nobody could be more fierce about child molestation than me. I”ve been to jail over it.

That is why the column in the Herald Sun by Andrew Bolt this week cut me deeply. He was entitled to his opinion and I interviewed him on 3AW about his savage written views.

But he made much of the fact that I “dropped her” the next day. I ended the fledgling relationship instantly, explicitly, because of that. Because it was wrong and it was illegal.

I can still hear her words (all these years later) at the Exhibition Street restaurant when she challenged me about why it was wrong. Why was I upset? Why we couldn’t see each other any more?

I explained I was legally too old for her. That our relationship was against the law in this country. And I never saw her again.

I am taking some heavy artillery on this. Friends have said: “Why on earth did you raise it?” My answer is that because it happened and it would be hard to defend that teacher, and would be hypocritical, without revealing the truth about myself. And how I had been fooled (conned is too hard a word) by a teenager.

And, to sceptics, let me say this: I had teenagers on my radio programme this week who boasted how they passed themselves off as 25 year olds. How they got into clubs etc. One 14-year-old daughter of a well-known celebrity told me she often managed to pass herself off as a person in her twenties.

In my situation, and some will say I am clutching at straws, I have asked the question: what was the Women’s Weekly doing running lingerie ads of a woman (girl) with a fabulous figure and beautiful face who was only fifteen years old?

She, with no malice, fooled me. I hope I never fool you.

March 27, 2005

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2005