‘If victims don’t come forward, what then?’

Louise Milligan, Witness

The street entrance to the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court is a scoop-hungry gauntlet of journos who spend the day jostling for soundbites, ever ready to give chase. As a rookie reporter, Louise Milligan used to be part of the Sydney court scrum, but when she arrived to give evidence in Australia’s ‘Trial of the Decade’, she had become the story. In her investigative work for ABC’s Four Corners – which begat the Walkley Book Award-winning volume Cardinal: The rise and fall of George Pell (2017) – Milligan had been the first person to hear one of the criminal accusations against the Vatican’s disgraced treasurer. If Pell’s defence team could discredit her, they could discredit what she’d heard. ‘As journalists, it’s always drummed into us that you are not the story. Never become the story,’ Milligan writes in her follow-up, Witness. ‘It’s the weirdest thing, when you have no interest in becoming the story, but you have no choice.’