IN MORAL DANGER

Bob Vernon was one of the most famous, or infamous, barristers in Melbourne. He was a brilliant criminal lawyer and defended some of the best know crims in Australia.

But what many people did not know was that Vernon had a personal dark side and according to a colleague was “ the most corrupt barrister I have ever known”.

When he was 42 he literally bought a 14-year-old girl from her grandmother to be his sex slave in Melbourne.

Her name was Barbara Biggs. She had been a runaway at 13, at 16 admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital and at 19 was a prostitute in Japan.

She went on to become a journalist – some would say a backward step – and is the author of a brutally frank new book called “In Moral Danger”.

It is the story of a survivor. A story that award-winning journalist/publisher Andrew Rule describes as “ part Lolita, part The Getting of Wisdom, and part Jerry Springer grotesque.” And he says “ it is a gritty real-life soap opera told with brutal candour and black humour”.

It not only tells her story; it also shows the hypocrisy of the legal profession. A profession so skilled in exposing the crooks and charlatans in our society but so inept, even coy, about exposing wrongdoers in its own ranks.

Vernon was never charged with unlawful carnal knowledge. Never faced a court for statutory rape. But Barbara Biggs did get some legal consolation years and years later.

In 1996 the Victorian Crimes Compensation Tribunal awarded her the maximum $20,000 for her childhood ordeal at the hands of a man who mocked the legal system.

And Vernon? The lying venal mouth-for-hire died from an appropriate condition. He got cancer of the tongue.

Monday, April 14, 2003

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2002