Nary always had this uncanny sense of seeing me if I went near my favorite café next to the river in Phnom Penh and would come up to me with a broad happy smile. About a month ago I saw Nary walking on the road in the opposite direction to me, but she did not seem to recognize me until she was only a couple of meters away. Her face was blank and she showed little of the enthusiasm that I had become used to. I recognized that something was different but I had no idea what. I could not just leave her standing there so I invited her to come to the café with me. When the waitress asked Nary what she wanted, Nary could only mumble a response.

Nary had always told me that she worked as a cook and rented a room not far from the café, while her mother lived on the very outskirts of Phnom Penh about an hour away by “tuktuk” taxi. I felt that Nary was in no condition to be left alone, so I invited her back to my apartment. She went straight to the bathroom, had a shower, and then wrapped herself in a large towel and lay on the bed.

Sometime later I went to the bathroom and was shocked to see that her thick panties were lying in the washbasin with a huge amount of blood. I went into the bedroom to ask Nary about this but she just rolled over and I then saw that there was now a lot of blood seeping through the towel wrapped around her lower body. If I had any doubts that she had been sexually assaulted they were removed that night. While I tried totally unsuccessfully to sleep on the living room couch Nary spent the whole night sitting on the bed with the lights on and talking to some imaginary persons or God. The “conversation” was intense and continuous. At about 3 am I heard uncontrollable crying which lasted for well over an hour despite my efforts calm her down.

Neither of us had slept and when dawn broke I told Nary that she could stay in my apartment for a long as she wanted. Nevertheless, Nary insisted that she wanted to go “home”. I gave her $100 and said she could come back in the future. I had put Nari’s underwear in the washing machine and the blood had washed out – but Nary decided to throw these in the bin and left my apartment without any panties.

Contrast this with Brittany Higgins who willingly went back to Parliament House with Bruce Lehrmann, took her white dress off and put it on the floor next to a couch and lay on the couch waiting for him. For some reason Lehrmann was slow to move and by the time he got to her she was half asleep.

Nary has always refused to tell me what had happened. In contrast, Higgins happily lied and tricked her way to getting over $2m in compensation — while all the time partying in her white dress while falsely telling police it was in a bag under her bed because of its association with “rape”!

Justice Michael Lee, who justifiably did not like or trust Lehrmann, probably thinks the word “rape” applies equally to Nary and Higgins when the reality of the world suggests that they are very different things.