Naming names

Almost twenty years on, the website is still there. It is crude, even for a thing of its time, but you still feel its sense of urgency.1

It says, a grave miscarriage of justice is taking place. These men, with their names suppressed, have done it before: the pack rape, the violation, the intimidation. It’s easy to join the dots - you just have to follow these links below to a few older articles. And you need to warn other women. You might be breaching a suppression order, so here’s what you can do. Log in to this email account using these details. Add the information about the men and hit send to whoever you choose. You’ll be anonymous.

The website is signed, The silent women of Aotearoa.

It seems like name suppression is in the news every other day. It cops a lot of criticism, including from both sides of the political divide. The Government is currently reforming it, but by reviving and tweaking a Bill the previous Labour-led Government created before it lost the last election.2 What exactly is behind the controversy?

On one hand, open justice is critical: a legal system that’s transparent, so the community can judge if it’s working fairly. A transparent legal system also lets victims of crime speak about their experiences if they want to, including warning others. On the other hand, transparency can sometimes hurt people. Defendants can be exposed to serious harm, beyond the reasonable consequences of their actions - or worse, the innocent people around them can be harmed too. Defendants’ right to a fair trial can be compromised, not just affecting them, but potentially drawing out difficult court processes for already-suffering victims.

Name suppression deliberately puts limits on open justice. We don’t know the names or details of people before the courts - or sometimes, even after they’re convicted. And because name suppression decisions can involve judges considering people’s confidential details, we don’t always find out why it’s been granted. This lack of transparency can make it hard for the community to know whether justice is being done - or can even give the impression that criminals’ rights are coming first, with victims’ rights a distant second.3

We’re heading into a tricky terrain. Is name suppression broken, like the pundits say? If it is, what could fix it?

We’re going to start by looking at the way the law around name suppression works, using the fictional example of Mr Smith.4

We’ll assume Mr Smith’s a highly-respected community member with a business and flash suits and important friends - or he was, at least, until his greed caught up with him. Mr Smith was also the chair of a local organisation receiving all sorts of funding. Shrewdly, he spotted a weakness in the organisation’s financial systems. Unable to resist, he began diverting money into his own pockets - and then, having dug himself in deep, he started forging documents to cover his tracks. When the police got in touch wanting to interview him, he knew exactly why, and he knew what was coming. He gathered his thoughts and called his lawyer.

Why was getting name suppression so important to Mr Smith?

Name suppression prevents people’s names or identifying details being published, either in the mainstream media or on social media.5 The rules for name suppression are mostly set out in the Criminal Procedure Act 2011.6 Certain people get automatic suppression, without a judge having any say in the matter. Someone accused of a sexual connection with a dependant family member qualifies. If, say, a parent has sexually abused their child, then identifying the parent is likely to identify - and further harm - the child too. But that wasn’t Mr Smith’s situation. If he’d been charged in the Youth Court, because he was aged between 14 and 18, he also would’ve got automatic suppression. However, Mr Smith was very much an adult.

Automatic suppression was off the table for Mr Smith, but his options weren’t exhausted. Anyone can apply for something called general suppression. A judge gets to decide on general suppression, but not from a blank page - the Criminal Procedure Act 2011 sets out rules for how judges make these decisions. Mr Smith’s lawyer, Ms Brown, talked him through the rules. To start, she explained, The law says there are eight reasons the court could agree to give you general suppression. A bunch of those reasons don’t seem to apply to you. For example, I can’t see how people knowing your name would prejudice the maintenance of the law, or the security or defence of New Zealand.

Mr Smith nodded. That was two reasons ruled out.

Ms Brown went on, And I don’t think people knowing your name would mean someone else with name suppression could be identified, or would cause someone else to be endangered - or that there would be undue hardship to any victim of your offence.

Again, Mr Smith had to agree. Another three reasons had been crossed off the list.

Ms Brown mused, I don’t think this is a situation where people knowing your name would cast suspicion on someone else and cause them hardship, would it?

She was probably right, and Mr Smith sighed. They’d now covered the six reasons for general name suppression that are aimed at protecting other people. But there were two reasons left, both to do with protecting the defendant themselves - people like Mr Smith.

Sometimes, Ms Brown explained, people knowing your name can prejudice your right to a fair trial. Say you’ve got petty crime in your past, and the media reports it. People might assume you’re guilty of these new charges straight off the bat. That might influence the jury to make up their minds without looking at the evidence properly.7

But that wasn’t Mr Smith’s situation either.

There’s one more reason general suppression can be granted, and Ms Brown ran it past her client. Sometimes, if people know your name, it can cause you or someone in your life extreme hardship - if you’re charged, or you’re convicted, or even if you’re acquitted. Ms Brown asked Mr Smith, Could this apply to you?

Mr Smith thought aloud. He knew his wife would probably leave him, and he couldn’t really blame her. He worried his kids would get a tough time at school, but he also knew they’d have good support from their mum. He expected his business would take a hit, but it wouldn’t go under - his business partner would continue to run it. Mostly, Mr Smith was worried about his mental health. He’d had a long history of anxiety and depression, and a tendency to self-medicate with booze. These things had taken him some pretty dark places. If everybody knew what he’d done, he was pretty sure he’d spiral.8

I need to warn you, Ms Brown explained, that to qualify for general suppression on the grounds of extreme hardship, things have to be really severe. It’s more than just the normal consequences of doing something bad, like feeling ashamed or being judged or losing friends - or even having mental health problems. To put it bluntly, the courts tend to think about extreme hardship as self-harming, being targeted for vigilantism, that kind of thing.

Mr Smith decided that arguing ‘extreme hardship’ was his best shot at general suppression. He asked Ms Brown, Do you think it’ll work?

She replied, You need to be aware that when we get to court, the judge will think about your application in two steps. First, do you meet one of the eight reasons we’ve talked about? Even if the answer’s yes, name suppression still isn’t a given. The second step is weighing up whether your reason is strong enough to trump other important things like open justice - the public knowing what’s going on.

OK, said Mr Smith. What happens next?

Ms Brown described the process. The first time we go to court, you can apply for interim suppression. You’ll have to show you’ve got an ‘arguable case’ for one of the eight reasons we talked about - and to be honest, pretty much everyone who tries for interim suppression succeeds initially. If nothing else, this’ll give you time to tell your family and your business partner, so they don’t find out from the news. The second time you go to court, the rubber hits the road. You can start making your arguments to keep your interim name suppression going - and as things progress, you can even try for permanent suppression. If you want permanent suppression, the court has to ask your victims what they think about it, but the court doesn’t have to do what victims says.

It was a lot to take in. Ms Brown added, You need know that if you get name suppression, the media are allowed to mount a legal challenge against it. You’re a high-profile person, and they’ll be keen to publish your story.

Mr Smith asked, What’ll happen, the second time I go to court, if I get turned down for name suppression? Ms Brown explained, Well, you might be able to appeal the decision, if the courts let you - and your suppression will last while you’re in the appeal process. But, she added a bit delicately, You should be aware it takes a lot of resources to appeal things through the courts.

Mr Smith’s heart sank. He thought to himself, I’ve got money, but I haven’t got that much money.

Mr Smith has introduced us to the current law around name suppression, but laws don’t arrive out of nowhere. Name suppression in Aotearoa has an interesting and controversial history - and we’re now going to look at this history to reveal some key themes. We’ll mostly draw on the research of Francine Taylor of Massey University. She explores this history from the perspective of a journalist, not a lawyer, so open justice and media rights are important angles for her.9

The first stirrings of name suppression in Aotearoa came, perhaps unsurprisingly, out of a tragedy. In 1905, a man got his 15-year-old employee pregnant, but escaped prosecution when the young woman died in childbirth. The tawdry reporting of the case outraged people; and so that same year lawmakers passed legislation to restrict publication of criminal evidence that could morally corrupt under-21-year-olds. The legislation stopped short of introducing name suppression as such, but you could say it was a first step. The media were angry, calling the reform censorship - a complaint that would be repeated over many decades.

That same year, something else happened: the New Zealand Truth newspaper was founded. The New Zealand Truth quickly became known for being trashy and sordid (a reputation it had its whole life, until it folded in 2013 under the ownership of Camerson Slater). And it was a vocal critic of name suppression. As well as printing sex scandals and divorce cases involving adultery, the New Zealand Truth annoyed lawmakers by publishing evidence from an upcoming court case (a problem, because this can interfere with a defendant’s right to a fair trial). One MP even called the newspaper ‘one of the vilest productions that ever issued from the printing press’. Vile or not, the legal system was stuck with the New Zealand Truth, because even though the 1905 legislation had restricted what exactly the media could report, it enshrined their right to attend court. This right was a double-edged sword. Without further rules, it seemed gutter journalism could be here to stay.

In 1920 came more change: something closer to our modern name suppression approach. New legislation meant judges could now choose to suppress some first-time offenders’ names if they wanted, the aim being to protect young people. But giving judges the choice, without much guidance from the law on how to exercise that choice, was a problem. Judges used their discretion inconsistently - another concern that would be echoed through the years. A ‘respectable’ mother and daughter who twice pinched hats from a hat shop got name suppression, but a 16-year-old girl who nicked a wristwatch missed out. Critics started to grumble that name suppression was about hushing the misdeeds of the wealthy.

In 1930 the pendulum swung further, with name suppression extended to include personal details. That meant the media could no longer sidestep name suppression by dropping hints and letting people join the dots - or they’d face a financially ruinous £100 fine. Over the decades that followed, name suppression kept moving away from its original goal of protecting youth. Judges were given the choice to apply name suppression to more and more people - until 1975, when an historic reform introduced automatic name suppression for every accused person, right up to the end of their case. At the same time, a blanket prohibition (one the judge did not get to decide) was placed on publishing the names of children in sexual violence cases, and defendants in incest cases.10

The media were furious at the 1975 reforms, arguing they could now report almost nothing at all, and warning of secret trials. Lawyers were worried too. The new approach began to unravel when Gerald O’Brien, an MP for the then-Labour government, was accused of sexually molesting two boys. His name couldn’t be published - and that saw other MPs contacting the media, anxious about mistaken identity and insisting it wasn’t them. O’Brien waived his own name suppression, and claimed he was being targeted by political enemies. In the end, his charges got chucked out. But the incident had made the downsides of name suppression pretty clear to lawmakers, and the 1975 blanket prohibition lasted only 10 months.

Despite the partial backdown on the 1975 reforms, the law continued to change over time, with name suppression applied to more and more people. Witnesses. Members of the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service. All victims of sexual offending. People made to give DNA samples (unless they’d been charged with a crime). Even undercover cops, who were allowed to use aliases instead of their real names. And penalties for breaking name suppression were harsh - especially name suppression in relation to witnesses.

By the late 2000s, plenty of people thought the pendulum had well and truly swung too far. Worried that open justice was being eroded, the Law Commission (basically an independent organisation of legal nerds) wrote a report. The report acted as a kick in the pants, and lawmakers responded by putting new name suppression rules in the Criminal Procedure Act 2011 - the legislation we have today. In theory at least, the Act means name suppression is used more sparingly, with fewer situations where it happens automatically.11 And when it’s not automatic, name suppression can’t be left too much to the discretion of judges, but has to be weighed up using rules. The judge has to decide if an application fits one of eight reasons set out in the law - like we saw above, in our story of Mr Smith - and then decide if it’s in the public interest. Importantly, the Act also gives media the right to make legal challenges against name suppression.

History’s shown what a tricky balancing act name suppression involves. Open justice is clearly really important. But what about giving people a second chance, so they can learn from their mistakes and get their lives back on track? Or stopping out-of-proportion punishment, including from cruel tabloid or social media coverage? Protecting victims, witnesses, and the family members of defendants? Preventing people who go on to be found not guilty from having their lives ruined regardless?

Have we got the balance right?

We’ve now dug into the way name suppression works, seen the main ideas behind it, and posed a few questions. It’s time to look at some major criticisms: that name suppression is for rich people, that it stops the kind of public scrutiny that prevents people reoffending, and that it puts the rights of victims ahead of criminals.

First things first. The media focuses on high-profile name suppression cases - people like our Mr Smith. If you or I got name suppression, probably no one would care, unless we’d done something heinous. That means reading the news gives the impression that name suppression is a rich person’s game. Is this perception or reality?

Like much in life, it depends on who you ask.

The Criminal Procedure Act 2011 says explicitly, The fact that a defendant is well known does not, of itself, mean that publication of his or her name will result in extreme hardship. We have to be a little careful how we talk here: not every high-profile person is rich, and not every person who’s high profile or rich is white. But we know these different types of privilege have a way of coming together in a clump.12 Even so, the law is pretty clear: high-profile people shouldn’t get special treatment. But is that what actually happens? What does the evidence say?

This is where it gets tricky. Data on name suppression shows things like the gender, age and ethnicity of people getting name suppression, what type of name suppression they’re getting, and for what crimes.13 It doesn’t say anything about rich or poor. We have a clue in the fact that Pākehā are three times more likely to get name suppression than Māori, even though Māori are more often charged with and convicted of crimes - suggesting there’s a privilege clump happening here.14

Without much direct evidence on whether name suppression is for rich people, we need to ask lawyers working in the justice system - and even they don’t agree.

On one hand, there’s the lawyers who say, ‘nothing to see here’. In their view, the courts have a high bar for granting name suppression, and are stringent about treating everyone the same. A case in point is Joseph Parker, the boxer who was linked to a group importing meth but was never charged. He was denied name suppression. The judge knew Parker would experience hardship if people knew it was him, but felt this was outweighed by the public’s right to know.15

On the other hand, some lawyers will say yes: rich people are more likely to get name suppression, but it’s not just straight-out bias. There are other issues at play.

First, the more obvious issue. No matter how fair the name suppression process may or may not be, rich people have better access to it - like every aspect of the justice system. Remember Mr Smith? The moment he knew he was in hot water, he was on the phone to Ms Brown, his lawyer. Someone with less money would need to rely on legal aid to try for name suppression - but the legal aid process only kicks in after a person’s first court appearance, by which time the news is probably out.16 Added to that, rich people can hire better lawyers and appeal name suppression decisions.

The second issue is this: if you’re a high-profile person, having your name published genuinely could be more likely to cause extreme hardship. You’ll be splashed across the media and savaged online in a way the everyday person wouldn’t be.17

It’s hard to know just how much name suppression privilege the rich enjoy - but we’re all aware of individual cases. One of those cases is James Wallace. In fact, in a Ministry of Justice document that’s part of the current name suppression reform (something called a regulatory impact statement), Wallace is cited as a reason change is needed.18 We’ll briefly cover his offending then look at his fight for name suppression, asking ourselves whether his case is an argument to change the rules.

Before he became known as an abuser, James Wallace was a patron of the arts; but before that, he was a man who’d inherited a fortune. His family made their money from the meat industry - enough that in 2018, NBR estimated Wallace’s wealth at $165 million. And with that wealth he acquired things: a mansion, an art collection of some nine thousand works, a knighthood. Other men.19

There were three victims with three allegations against Wallace: one allegation from 2000 or 2001, another from 2008, and the third from 2016. Through much of the period of Wallace’s offending, warnings would circulate: don’t go to the man’s place, and definitely don’t go alone.20 But the warnings didn’t reach the victims. They visited or stayed with Wallace at his lavish home, Rannoch House - one because Wallace had offered him a place to live, and the others because they were in the arts themselves and seeking the support of a powerful backer. A victim later said Wallace had ‘a conveyor-belt-like system of access to young men’.21

After the first victim came forward, Wallace was charged in 2017. He went to court in 2019, but in a bizarre series of happenings, the trial lasted only two weeks. A secret recording came to light, capturing associates of Wallace having a meeting at an Auckland bar. The associates were wondering what to do next: they’d travelled to the Gold Coast to wine and dine the first victim to come forward, in the hope of bribing the young man to drop his complaint. When the victim refused to play ball, the associates met again at the Auckland bar to consider what next - one recounting a conversation he’d had with Wallace, in which they’d ‘joked’ about killing the victim and making it look like a car accident. With a grenade like the secret recording lobbed into proceedings, the 2019 trial had to be aborted, and things started over.22

It wasn’t until March 2021 that Wallace was eventually convicted on three charges of indecent assault, and two of trying to dissuade a victim from giving evidence. He was sentenced to prison. It would not be until June 2023 - more than two years after he was sentenced, and over six years from when he was first charged - that the public would learn his name. How could this be?

Of course, as a rich man, Wallace had been onto his lawyer and gotten interim suppression at the first whiff of trouble. Conviction is usually the moment that name suppression stops. But Wallace indicated he intended to appeal his convictions, which let him keep his name suppression until those appeals were exhausted - the reasoning being that if his name got out, any possible retrial he might get could be unfair to him.23 And if that was frustrating for his victims, the media and the public, then Wallace’s plan B can only have been infuriating.

As his appeal options were running out, Wallace must have seen the writing on the wall. He started a new name suppression application, claiming changed circumstances and - you guessed it - extreme hardship.24 His new application wasn’t just on behalf of himself, but on behalf of organisations he was involved in, saying they’d experience hardship if his identity got out. You can already tell this line of argument is going to be a rich guy thing. Bear with me while I try to explain the details.

To support his personal claim of extreme hardship, Wallace pointed out that he was old (now in his mid-80s) and his health was going downhill. No dice, said the courts: there was nothing extreme about this hardship. And what about his claim the organisations would suffer hardship too? Courts tend to use careful language, but even they thought Wallace was taking the mickey.

To give you a flavour: one of the organisations was restoring an historic building damaged by the Canterbury earthquakes. Wallace argued to the court that if other people knew he, the chair of the organisation, was also a criminal, they might stop donating to the organisation. The thing was, Wallace had been involved in the organisation for a while; but it was in 2022, after his conviction, he became the organisation’s chair. At that point, he knew his name suppression would likely end soon, and the organisation knew it too. But his concern for the organisation’s reputation only seemed to develop at the moment of his new name suppression application.

The court found that Wallace had ‘failed by a considerable margin’ to demonstrate he or the organisations would face extreme hardship without name suppression. And they added that hiding Wallace’s crimes, so people would still give money to organisations connected to him, would be the opposite of open justice. In other words, people had the right to know this stuff before they forked out their cash.

But the court’s hands were tied. Because this was a new name suppression application, it came with own appeals process, and that basically reset the clock. Wallace had literally bought himself more time. The court said: While we do not accept that the correct procedure has been followed by commencing a fresh application for name suppression in this Court, we reluctantly extend the existing name suppression orders for 20 days from the date of this judgment. That 20 days is the time a person is allowed to appeal a name suppression decision that doesn’t go their way, and is followed by the appeal itself, whenever that can be heard. Name suppression stays in place to the bitter end of the whole process.25

OK: if you’re anything like me, you can’t read about Wallace without clenching your teeth in rage. All in all, he managed to string out his name suppression appeals for two years.26 But we need to take a step back. A situation like this, where someone with money takes advantage of the rules so egregiously, is pretty rare. A lawmaker should ask if it makes sense to change the name suppression rules, or any rules, based on one case - and it’s an important question.

The answer’s not straightforward.

To Wallace’s victims, his name suppression bids must have felt like another chapter in the story of his abuse. As recently as May 2024, when the parole board asked if he continued to deny his offending, Wallace replied “absolutely” - because to admit anything would be to “would mean the others had won”.27 Won, as if it were some sort of game.

We talked about the way privilege clumps. Wallace’s privilege extended well beyond any name suppression decision or court process: these were the visible tip of a much bigger iceberg, glimpses of an entitlement that had characterised the man’s life. Wallace may be one case, but he’s a system problem.

Right. We’ve looked into the first of three major criticisms of name suppression, that it’s for rich people. We’re now going to look at the second major criticism: that name suppression stops the kind of public scrutiny that prevents people reoffending. This is an important aspect of open justice. Simply put, if the public knows someone’s done something bad, we can choose whether to have contact with them. If we avoid them, we might take away their chance to commit another crime against us.

Before we dive into this second criticism, we need to acknowledge that this, too, is an area where we don’t have much evidence. The media reports cases where things go wrong. When things go right - name suppression works as it’s meant to, and people get back on track - it doesn’t make the headlines. That said, we’re going to cover a case where things went spectacularly wrong, the fallout from that case, and what it might tell us. Here goes.

You may know of her by different names. She was Joanne Sidebottom when she grew up in the UK. But by the time this sordid story began in earnest, in 2006, she was Joanne Sharp - and she was in Aotearoa, having provided misleading information in her visa application. But her bogus CV, claiming roles she’d never held, must have impressed her new employer, Tower Insurance. They paid her a relocation fee of $35,000 to move to our shores. They’d later pay the fee again, when she claimed it a second time by falsifying a copy of her own employment agreement.28

People say much the same things of Joanne. She was friendly, bubbly, and competent. And she seemed trustworthy: after all, her office proudly displayed a helmet from her time with the police in the UK - another job she’d never held. She could also, as her colleagues would learn, be ruthless when anyone crossed her.

The unravelling began when Sharp started putting pressure on a contractor working for Tower Insurance. She wanted the contractor to employ her husband. The contractor was uneasy, but he felt coerced - after all, his contract with Tower Insurance was worth about 70% of his income, and Sharp held the company’s purse strings. If he didn’t do what Sharp wanted, the contractor figured he might find himself in trouble. Sharp’s husband proved an incompetent and spineless employee to the contractor. Sharp moved her husband into a new role, with Tower itself - perhaps because the contractor was now suspicious. The husband used his new Tower job to axe the contractor’s work with Tower, taking a massive bite out of the man’s livelihood.

All this drew the attention of another Tower Insurance employee, who spoke up. Tower gave Sharp’s husband the boot - but that brought the wrath of Sharp down on the whistleblowing employee’s head. She used her role to set up a unit dedicated to finding dirt on both the employee and contractor. But she was on borrowed time. An executive assistant at Tower made another startling discovery. “A shame that I missed you when you were in Auckland”, the executive assistant said on the phone one day to a different contractor. This contractor was confused: he hadn’t travelled to Auckland for months. Why then had Sharp made a claim for his hotel expenses?

It turned out Sharp had been using every trick in the book: creating bonuses for staff she then paid to herself, buying personal stuff with company money, you name it. By the time she stood in the dock in 2007, she was charged with frauds adding to $110,000 - although the real total she’d stolen was thought to be $300,000. Sharp pled guilty but avoided a jail term, getting community service instead.

With her sentence decided, it was time for the court to consider Sharp’s application for permanent name suppression. Sharp argued that if her name was published, it would cause extreme hardship for her then 14-year-old son. The judge granted the permanent name suppression, with words that would come to haunt him: "I saw - and still see the present [offending] as involving a one-off situation…. Suffice it to say that in my judgment the possibility of reoffending is in no way on any kind of cards.”

The executive assistant who’d busted Sharp saw her after the hearing, with her lawyer, on a stairwell outside the courtroom. Sharp pumped her fist and hissed a satisfied ‘Yes’.

That was Joanne Sharp; but it was the next name she chose herself that would become infamous.

Joanne Harrison was employed by the Ministry of Transport in 2011, initially as an HR manager. If her CV was notable, her on-the-job performance must have been more so, because in the years that followed she was promoted up the ranks. In time, she became a general manager - part of the Ministry’s leadership team, and in control of a chunk of the Ministry’s budget.

On 11 April 2016, some five years after Harrison was hired, the chief executive of the Ministry of Transport received an odd message on LinkedIn. He responded with a phone call. On the other end, an unnamed informant asked the chief executive, did he know one of his senior managers had previously gone by the name Joanne Sharp? And did the chief executive know this person had a fraud conviction from her time with Tower Insurance, but was given permanent name suppression?

The chief executive hadn’t known. He had Harrison’s recruitment record checked, but details had been removed - as an HR manager, Harrison had had access to these personal files. Her CV had vanished too, but an electronic search recovered both it and another CV she’d submitted a few years before. The two CVs didn’t match: a red flag. Surveillance was covertly set up in Harrison’s office. It was a month later, on 16 May 2016, that the frauds themselves began to be uncovered. The Ministry realised Harrison had manipulated another staffer into becoming her partner in crime, and confronted, that person spilled the beans. Harrison had clearly figured out her boss was onto her, because from the day the surveillance began, she’d had her partner in crime destroying records. And she’d transferred her house into her husband’s name, before fleeing to Canada - then inexplicably coming back to Aotearoa and being arrested at the airport.

Harrison had been raising Ministry eyebrows long before 2016, when the informant made contact with the chief executive through LinkedIn. Her behaviour was brazen. She’d created fake invoices from fictional contractors, directing the payments to herself. She’d gotten her ineffectual husband three paid roles without ever declaring a conflict of interest. She got a job for a friend who never showed up to work in ten months. Her colleagues had known something was fishy. But Harrison had turned on these colleagues as viciously as she at Tower Insurance, restructuring them out of their jobs just before Christmas - but not before humiliating them by making them train a temp as their replacement.

All up, Harrison had defrauded the Ministry of Transport - and ultimately, the taxpayer - to the tune of over $700,000. She went to court in 2017, and was sent to prison. On her release she was deported back to the UK and banned from ever returning to Aotearoa.

When the news broke of Harrison’s Ministry fraud, it was explosive: but even then, the media couldn’t report Harrison’s previous conviction. The permanent name suppression order for her earlier crimes remained in place until 2019, when it was successfully challenged by the media. A whole lot of dots could now be joined.

It would come to light that between her convictions for the Tower Insurance frauds and the Ministry of Transport frauds years later, Harrison had been busy. With her name suppressed for the Tower convictions, she’d immediately gotten a job with the Far North District Council, where she drew suspicion by spending hours outside the office at fabricated conferences. Here, it wasn’t fraud but falsifying her CV that saw her pushed out the door in 2008. She then did a stint to 2009 with the Department of Corrections, during which time she gave false information to Work and Income to also claim a benefit. After that came a role in Australia from 2010 to 2011, where she quickly found herself under investigation for defrauding another employer, and fled before she could be charged - the Australian police reaching out to our own police several times for information on her.

What the hell went wrong? It’s a question with many potential answers, but we’re going to look at the name suppression aspect.

Once Harrison’s name suppression was finally lifted, and everyone knew about the Tower Insurance frauds, politicians waded in, criticising the judge who made the name suppression decision (a big call, because judges are meant to be left to do their jobs without fear or favour, and not be influenced by politics). The Bar Association hit back, reminding the politicians that everyone’s an expert after the fact. Is that a cop out? Were the name suppression rules themselves the problem? Or did the judge just do a bad job applying the rules? Or perhaps the rules were fine, and the judge applied them well enough - but no system is perfect, and we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater?

It’s hard to say. The judge who granted name suppression accepted that Harrison’s 14-year-old son would suffer extreme hardship - meeting one of the eight reasons that make up the first step for determining name suppression. Personally, I don’t want to second guess the judge here. It seems plausible a kid would suffer with a mum like Harrison, and I feel sorry for him. But what about the second step in deciding name suppression, where the judge has to balance whether the reason for name suppression outweighs the public interest in knowing someone’s a criminal? Drawing on reports from experts, the judge formed a view Harrison wouldn’t reoffend - and on that basis, he gave her another chance, putting the public interest second. The rest, as they say, is history.

If Harrison had never gotten name suppression for her Tower Insurance crimes, it might well have stopped her reoffending. Then again, it might not. There are many checks and balances that are meant to stop fraud, and in Harrison’s case, none were effective. To some extent, these checks and balances rely on a base level of honesty: people who don’t change their names, lie about their lives, fail to declare their convictions with their employers. You have to wonder if there is any check or balance Harrison wouldn’t shamelessly try to circumvent - and whether she might just get away with it.

Why do I think this?

The media followed up on Harrison after she’d returned to the UK. By now, her name suppression lifted, she was well-known in Aotearoa - and her crimes had been reported in the UK too. On her release from prison, she’d promised the parole board she wouldn’t change her name again to hide her record. Jounalists doing the follow-up found no Joanne Harrison, but they did find a Joanna Middleton. And while Joanna Middleton had not committed any further frauds that the journalists could find, she’d posted a fake CV on LinkedIn, with no reference to her time in Aotearoa, and had started a plausible-looking website with the same name as a major company, but suspiciously devoid of contact details other than a mobile number.

It seemed as if history was poised to repeat itself.

A warning. So much is distressing about what comes next - both the offending itself, and the fact that a kid could be capable of it.

During the several weeks I worked on this piece, I came across a notorious recent case of crime and name suppression. It involved a young man known in the media and court documents as ‘LF’. The young man had applied unsuccessfully for permanent name suppression, ultimately appealing all the way to the Supreme Court, with the suppression staying in place until his appeals ran out.

But as I read the Supreme Court’s judgement, I felt confused. The court had made its decision against LF ages ago - meaning LF’s name should have been revealed in about June 2024. It hadn’t been. What was going on?29

We’ve come to the third of our major criticisms of name suppression: that it puts criminals’ rights first and victims’ rights second. Earlier, when we looked at the history of name suppression, we saw how the ideas behind it are complex, and sometimes butt up against each other. Open justice. Protecting victims. Giving offenders a second chance, especially if they’re young. And, of course, the right to a fair trial.

This is where things get really tricky, and it takes some brainwork to keep up. LF’s case is important to look at, because so many of the different ideas behind name suppression don’t just butt up, but come into collision - with victims’ rights being especially fraught. Let’s start on this case by trying to understand what name suppression looks like from a victim’s perspective.

If you cast your mind back to the start of this piece, you’ll recall Mr Smith. Ms Brown, his lawyer, talked to Mr Smith about his name suppression options as a defendant. She advised him that sometimes a defendant can get general suppression - if they can meet one or more of eight reasons (the first step) and the reasons outweigh the public interest (the second step). Ms Brown also explained the difference between interim and permanent name suppression. She told Mr Smith how before making a permanent name suppression order for a defendant, the judge has to ask the victim what they think - although the judge isn’t bound by the victim’s opinion.30

But these aren’t the only name suppression scenarios a victim might face. Sexual offences can be more complicated. For some sexual offences, the victim gets automatic suppression, or the defendant does, with no say over the matter.31 The idea of this automatic suppression is to protect the victim (like the example we talked about earlier, when a parent has sexually abused their child, and identifying the parent is likely to identify the child too).

Already, you’re starting to see the problem. It’s a good idea to give the victim automatic protection at the beginning of the court process - otherwise they could lose control over their privacy at an already awful time. But once they’ve had a chance to figure out what’s best for them, shouldn’t victims get a choice whether their names are suppressed? After all, victims don’t all think alike or have the same needs. Some want to talk about what they’ve been through so they can heal. Some want to warn others about the person who hurt them. And some point out the potential for victims’ name suppression to reinforce the damaging idea that victims of sexual violence have a reason to be ashamed.32

Added to that, in situations where automatic suppression is in place to protect the victim, but the victim wants to lift the suppression, it’s the victim who has to kick off yet another legal process.33 That’s more time and stress, and potentially thousands in legal fees. And it’s not a perfect solution. If the defendant gets general suppression, then this effectively trumps the rights of the victim to lift their own automatic suppression, keeping them silent at least in the meantime.34

Now, I had to read several documents several times to figure all this out. Even though I’m trying to make it simple, you’re probably working hard to get your head around it too. With all these ideas colliding, and rules criss-crossing one another, you can see exactly why victims feel frustrated and confused and upset with name suppression. Let’s hang on to this insight and empathy as we look at the case of LF.

LF was aged between 14 and 17 when he hurt the girls: six of them in total. He raped, sexually violated, and indecently assaulted them. Charges against LF were first laid in the Youth Court, where LF would have gotten automatic name suppression - but because he was 17 during the later offences, and because the offences were so serious, the Crown was able to move his case to the District Court. There, he was treated like an adult, pled guilty, and received 12 months’ home detention. He also had to apply for general suppression like an adult. LF decided he wanted permanent suppression.

LF argued he was facing extreme hardship because of the threat to his safety. This threat came from his own mental health, which had suffered as a result of a number of factors, including people’s reactions to his crimes. But it wasn’t enough. The court declined to give him permanent name suppression.

LF began his appeals process. He threw another colliding idea into the mix. Because he’d been young when he offended, he said youth justice principles should apply: basically the idea that young people are more vulnerable, and more deserving of a second chance. Eventually, the Supreme Court weighed it all up. On one hand were LF’s age, and the possibility of rehabilitation. On the other, the seriousness of what he’d done and the views of his victims. Open justice won out.

These are the facts of the process, cold and hard. We need to go further, and try to understand how the process felt from the victims’ point of view.

LF’s six victims were school aged at the time, as he was. As victims of sexual offending, they were given automatic name suppression - but three of them chose to lift their suppression so both they and LF could be named. One of the three was Mia. She was 13 when LF violated her, and she needed to speak out about what happened. Later, as a young woman, she cried when she told the journalist; but she still looked into the camera.

LF had attacked Mia three times on the night of a party, when she was too drunk to defend herself. The first time was in a park. The second time was in a bus stop, where he cornered and pinned her. The third time, back at the party, Mia felt so helpless and scared she went limp. It was when Mia learned LF had also raped her friend that the girls went to the police. During court, the girls told the judge how angry and hateful and dangerous LF was. They said he couldn’t be trusted not do this again. LF’s application for permanent name suppression was turned down, but his intention to appeal meant the judge could do nothing more, and the suppression remained. To the distress of the victims, it would remain for years.

But that wasn’t the end of it.

In the weeks I worked on this piece, I would write sometimes in front of the TV, the news playing in the background. I kept half an eye on a story that unfolded night after night, glancing up sometimes from my laptop. There was this young man in the dock, then aged 21, although he looked more like a schoolkid. His name and details were suppressed. The young man had been charged with having sex at age 20 with a 13-year-old girl, but he claimed he’d believed she was 16. His lawyers argued that his autism meant he missed social cues and struggled to distinguish lies. I was sceptical, but I tried to reserve judgement. I believe in the right to a fair trial, and the responsibility to weigh evidence carefully and impartially.

The young man in the dock was found guilty, and the news finally revealed his identity. He was Luca Fairgray, or LF. His very lengthy name suppression was now explained. Although his bid for permanent name suppression had ultimately failed, he’d been charged with this new crime during his long appeals process - meaning he’d gotten another round of interim name suppression to preserve his right to a fair trial. That’s why his name still hadn’t appeared in the media after the Supreme Court turned down his appeal last year. But now, his name and crimes finally in the public domain, a whole lot of dots could be joined.

All along, three of Fairgray’s victims had been trying to help people join those dots - that’s why they’d had their automatic name suppression lifted. It was practically difficult for them to comply with Fairgray’s new round of interim name suppression, because it came over top of their own lifted suppression. The rules were criss-crossing. But this was about more than practical issues. As Fairgray’s name suppression went on and on, the three victims felt desperate.

By the time his name was revealed, it was some four years since Fairgray had pled guilty for his offences against the first six victims, and he’d long completed his sentence of 12 months’ home detention. That whole time, his victims couldn’t warn others. And it was during that time, just two months after completing his sentence, that Fairgray started having sex with the next 13-year-old, his seventh victim.

Fairgray’s earlier victims always believed that if they couldn’t speak out, he wouldn’t stop. And they were right. Mia later said that when she found out about the seventh victim, she vomited.

When the penny dropped for me, and I understood the serial rapist I’d been writing about was the young man on my TV, I paused. I thought about everyone involved. I reflected how the ideas behind name suppression sometimes collide brutally - how one person’s protection is another person’s pain. Still, it was complicated. Fairgray’s attempts at permanent name suppression were clearly cynical, and gave him a cover to reoffend - but he got the next round of interim name suppression so he’d get fair treatment at court. And that’s an important idea too. I asked myself: if I’d been a juror at Fairgray’s recent trial, there was no suppression and I’d known about his convictions, would that have influenced me?

If I’m honest, I’m pretty sure I would’ve been influenced, no matter how I tried not to be. That’s a challenging thing to admit: like I said, I try to weigh evidence carefully and impartially. You could say it doesn’t matter - Fairgray was clearly guilty - but if I'd known his history, I might not have given this young man a fair trial. Maybe you wouldn't either.

Like much in life, whether that’s a good or a bad thing depends on your point of view.

Right back at the beginning of this piece, I mentioned that the Government is currently trying to reform name suppression. By now, we’ve delved pretty deeply into how name suppression works. We’ve seen how the important ideas underlying name suppression sometimes butt up against each other - and that makes it hard to create simple fixes. So what does the Government plan to do differently? This again is a little bit tricky, but let’s step it through.35

In a nutshell, the Government reform will mean people convicted of sexual offences, and who want permanent name suppression for those offences, will only get it if their victims agree. There would be just a couple of exceptions. If the victim didn’t want to engage in the name suppression decision, the judge would get to decide instead. And if there were multiple victims who didn’t agree what should happen - say, one victim wanted the offender to have name suppression, and the other didn’t - then any details that identified the first victim couldn’t be published.

The idea behind the reform is to put victims’ wishes first - and to avoid the situation where victims are prevented from going public with their own experiences, and the names of people who’ve hurt them.

Before we try to weigh up this reform, there are a few things we need to be aware of.

These new rules will apply to a pretty small group. In 2023, permanent name suppression was granted to only 76 individuals convicted of sexual offences, a very small proportion of total convictions of this type. (Note, though, we don’t know the total who applied for permanent name suppression for sexual offence convictions - so we don’t know how many people tried to abuse it.)36

The new rules won’t stop someone like James Wallace attempting permanent name suppression just to string things out - although the game-playing wouldn’t last nearly so long. The new rules won’t apply at all to someone like Joanne Harrison, because she wasn’t a sexual offender. It’s not clear how the new rules would play out in a case like Luca Fairgray’s. He’d be more likely to go to trial with jurors and the public knowing his previous convictions - but that could create other issues, like the possibility of an unfair trial and therefore more appeals. And the new rules won’t touch on the situation of Fairgray’s victims, who had to go through a whole process to get their automatic name suppression lifted.

It’s fair to say the Government’s reform will have a limited impact, but is that impact good or bad?

Like we talked about before, victims aren’t a homogenous group - but we need to acknowledge that both victims and their advocates have come out strongly in favour of the Government reform. And we’ve seen why. In fact, Ruth Money, the Chief Victims Advisor to Government, thinks the reform should go further, because it doesn’t stop people with no real argument for name suppression still giving it a shot.

But the legal profession is just as strongly opposed to the Government reform. Why?

Legal experts point out that giving name suppression decisions to victims, not judges, essentially takes away the offender’s right of appeal - because appeals are for decisions made by courts. The right of appeal is important because it’s one way the legal system checks it’s doing a good job, applying the law properly and picking up any mistakes courts might make. If a victim made a bad decision in relation to name suppression - because it’s not their job to understand legal issues, or because they’re going through trauma - then the decision’s final, and any mistake is now locked in. That includes decisions that might result in grave consequences for the offender, like committing suicide, or that harm innocent people connected to the offender. And a victim, unlike a judge, doesn’t have all the details of an offender’s personal situation, so can’t take these into account.

More than that, legal experts worry that victims asked to take name suppression decisions, including child victims, could find themselves under duress. Imagine this terrible case scenario: a child has been subjected to sexual violence by a parent. Half of the child’s family members are saying to the child, You should name and shame him. The other half are saying, We’ve all been through enough: please let’s avoid more attention. Exposing a victim to pressure like that could do even more harm.

But does that mean we’re stuck? That in some name suppression situations, victims just need to accept they come second?

Graeme Edgeler, a legal commentator, believes there are better ideas to explore. For example, offenders could be given five days to lodge an appeal against a name suppression decision, instead of the current 20 days. Again, it wouldn’t stop the likes of James Wallace or Luca Fairgray, but it would shorten their game-playing. And instead of an automatic right to appeal, more offenders could instead have to seek leave to appeal (basically, make an application). Offenders with no real argument for name suppression would be stopped in their tracks before the game-playing could begin.37

For what it’s worth, I think these ideas deserve airtime, even if they wouldn’t solve all the problems that victims are experiencing. We need to talk about name suppression, but it might just be that we’re having the wrong conversation.

We started this piece with a crude website from almost twenty years old, signed by The silent women of Aotearoa.

Only, these activists weren’t silent: far from it. They not only counselled others on how to break the suppression orders, setting up an online system to do it. They networked with people all around the country, organising protests - even one outside the Police College. They handed out flyers with suppressed information to shoppers, to commuters, at universities and outside the courtroom itself. Some stopped when they learned that sharing the suppressed information could jeopardise any future court cases. Others carried on.

This was a trial that transfixed the country. We watched it on TV, read about it, talked about it. Throughout the proceedings, the public knew the defendants’ names - but mostly we didn’t know their names in relation to their past convictions. Those stories had been published by media without the perpetrators identified. Instead, we saw three defendants who’d served with the police: reputable family men who’d made some youthful mistakes, we were told. They were up against one woman complainant, made out be unreliable, emotional, promiscuous and prone to lie.

Not guilty, not guilty, not guilty: the three men walked free. Only two of them didn’t walk at all. They were bundled back into the van and taken to their cells at Mount Eden, as they had been every day of the trial. We’d never seen them enter and exit court, unlike their co-accused. Now we knew why.

To every woman who watched the news that night, in March 2007, the revelation felt like a sucker punch. Shipton and Schollum were acquitted of raping and violating Louise Nicholas. At the moment of their acquittal, the suppression orders were lifted. Just as the website warned, they’d done it before. They were in prison for it. Most of us had had no idea.

The other young woman had been only 20, and vulnerable - alone against a group of five men. They’d abducted her. Tied her up. Raped her. And as if they hadn’t hurt and degraded her enough, they’d claimed she was a willing participant.

All this had been suppressed to ensure that Shipton and Schollum got a fair trial. Women who watched the TV wondered, maybe for the first time, if they knew what that word - fair - even meant anymore. I was one of them.38

To this day, I don’t know whether it was right or wrong. All I know is how I felt in the moment. I’d never stopped to think about name suppression before, how one person’s protection could be another person’s pain. Now, suddenly, it was all I could see. It seemed like a game, and the game was rigged.

But that was years ago.

Time has passed and life has gone on, except for the victims.

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