"I had to lie for him": Ben Roberts-Smith’s ex drops bombshell
Ben Roberts-Smith’s ex-wife has testified against the SAS soldier, saying she was pressured to lie for him or lose her children.
Emma Roberts wiped away tears on her first day of giving evidence after detailing the breakdown of her marriage to Mr Roberts-Smith which resulted in a series of fiery text messages with a friend.
“I’m actually feeling so f***ing angry today,” one message read.
“I want to punch the f***ing c*** in the face,” another said.
The messages came nine days after Mr Roberts-Smith “left” for good.
It was also several months after Ms Roberts found out about his affair with a woman codenamed Person 17, she said.
The woman turned up unannounced on Ms Roberts doorstep, “crying a lot” and saying she had fallen pregnant with Mr Roberts-Smith, and revealing a black eye under dark sunglasses.
“I asked why she was not seeing him (any more). She kept pointing to her black eye and said, ‘because of this’,” Ms Roberts told the court.
Her testimony comes as the case between Mr Roberts-Smith and Nine newspapers continues, as the Victoria Cross recipient is suing The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Canberra Times for defamation in relation to a series of articles claiming he committed war crimes in Afghanistan between 2006 and 2012.
Ms Roberts said her former husband said “I was to lie” if allegations ever surfaced in the press in relation to the encounter with Person 17.
She recalled telling him she didn’t want to lie, and that he then pointed to their children.
“If you don’t lie, you will lose them.”
“I knew at that point I had to lie for him,” she said.
After the affair was revealed in a news article, Ms Roberts said she was asked to pose for a photo accompanying a front-page story in The Australian, saying the couple had separated at the time.
Though she denied suggestions from Mr Roberts-Smith’s barrister that they had separated at the time of the article’s publication, her relationship with Mr Roberts-Smith drew to a close in January 2020.
When money began to be withdrawn from their joint bank account at the time, she said she suspected it was being stashed in their garden.
But, when she did dig in the soil she found a pink lunchbox containing several USBs in duffel bags, which she gave to a friend who downloaded the contents to a laptop.
“I said ‘I do not want to see what’s on them’,” she told the court, recalling that she returned the box to the ground.
She also testified to seeing Mr Roberts-Smith downloading photographs of his time in Afghanistan onto his laptop, before watching him douse it in petrol and set it alight.
Ms Roberts denied that she was prompted by anger to fabricate stories to harm her former husband.
She will continue to give evidence as the trial progresses.
Image: Nine News