Fiona Barnett: The ‘Candy Girl’, the Royal Commission and the NSW Police

In the second part of her update, Fiona Barnett details the shocking mistreatment she has endured from certain NSW Police – and others – since testifying to the Child Abuse Royal Commission about her experiences as a victim of an international child sex trafficking ring.

Candy Girl: Part Two

[Read Part One HERE]

The Child Abuse Royal Commission has invested government dollars in an initiative called ‘Message to Australia‘:

‘… an opportunity for the people who have bravely told their stories to the Royal Commission to send a short message to the Australian community about their experience and their hopes for creating a safer environment for children in the future.’

Select victim messages will be published and stored in the public library — under “BS”.

If my message were selected for inclusion, it would read:

Don’t come forward as I have done! Don’t place your trust in investigative bodies, police and therapists. It’s not worth the risk to you and your family. If you insist on attending professional counselling, do so under a pseudonym and pay cash.

Here’s why.

At my 2013 hearing, I made some reasonable requests: witness protection, a chance to provide my testimony to police and for police to investigate my allegations. Two years on, I am still waiting for these requests to be fulfilled. I have not heard from my Royal Commission case manager since March 2014 when I provided her with additional information. Instead, I have experienced an increase in police indifference and harassment.

Certain NSW Police dismissed my witness testimony against a VIP paedophile ring as unworthy of collection and investigation. However, they simultaneously used the witness statements I provided them as grounds for suspending my pistol licence.

On 24 December 2014, its Firearms Registry gave me two days to surrender my licence or face possible criminal charges. Their deadline counted Christmas and Boxing Day as working days.

It appears that Tweed Heads Police sent my witness statements to the state Firearms Registry (located in nearby Murwillumbah) instead of to Sutherland Shire detectives.

When I confronted the detective with whom I made my statements about this action, he exclaimed:

“I didn’t do that!”

I told Detective Terry Frost I knew he was innocent.

During a recent conversation with the Sutherland detective inspector in charge of my case, I was informed that she only recently requested my statements from Tweed Heads Police and that she has not yet read them.

I heard from the Firearms Registry months before NSW Police told me whether my witness statements were in the hands of Sydney detectives, or if my allegations were being investigated.

Bettina Walker, manager of the NSW Police Firearms Registry, informed me that she had served 20 years as a police officer and:

“I know from experience the content of your statements is true.”

She said that I must undergo a psychiatric evaluation, based on my statement content, to determine whether I was a risk to myself or the public because of the crimes perpetrated against me in my childhood. This response from the NSW Police reminded me of AHPRA’s similar treatment of my child abuse history.

Members of the Murwillumbah Pistol Club said they had not previously seen police target someone’s registration as they had mine. They concluded it was retaliation for my whistleblowing against an international child trafficking ring.

Certain NSW Police further contributed to my harassment, by ignoring my requests for their assistance. During Halloween 2014, I arrived home to find my child’s dog baited and lying in a pool of blood.

Days following the baiting, my next door neighbour approached my property in a rage and started smashing at our locked front gate.

He screamed at me:

“I should have killed that dog! I’m gonna kill that dog!” 

He motioned to jump our fence.

A friend and ex-police officer, Amanda Prosser, was visiting my home at the time. Amanda instinctively intervened and managed the neighbour’s violence. It took her five minutes to make him leave my property. She called the police who attended and provided an event number: 56705529. The police promised to at least caution the neighbour, but did not.

I am convinced the neighbour would have assaulted me, because he previously assaulted my brother without provocation.

Shortly after moving from Wollongong (a major centre of my childhood abuse), the neighbour approached my brother, who was entering his car to attend work. The neighbour ambushed him from behind, grabbed him by the throat, and pinned him to his car.

The neighbour, who my brother had not previously met, grinned and dared my brother:

“Go on! Hit me!”

By Easter 2015, harassment of my family reached unprecedented intensity.

Our problem neighbour targeted us via his umpteenth vexatious complaint to local authorities — this time regarding a fence we legally erected years ago.

Then another one of my high profile perpetrators died, triggering another adverse reaction. Soon after, I suffered a mild head injury in a bizarre car accident.

Not long later, our family therapist caved under the unique pressures of working with an incomparable case of “complex trauma“. Losing our family therapist at such a critical moment, the timing appeared orchestrated. Just after our therapist emailed her sudden decision, our problem neighbour intentionally coated our property in asthma-inducing fibreglass debris for the third time this year.

Immediately after that, local police targeted our young daughter.

Police attended our family home after 8pm on a Friday. They claimed a pink iPhone 4 had been reported missing three hours earlier and that the Find my iPhone app had determined it was located inside our home. The senior investigating officer dogmatically asserted that the phone app constituted infallible technology and was accurate to within two metres. She immediately concluded our 10-year-old daughter had stolen the phone, dismissing any testimony, evidence or suggestion our daughter might be innocent.

The officer was defensive, aggressive, sarcastic and evasive. She could not provide us with an event number. She threatened to visit our home and interview our daughter to “jog her memory” concerning the phone’s whereabouts. She communicated to us that her questioning would frighten our child into confessing she stole the phone.

I told this officer she did not have permission to interview my child and that she would have to obtain a warrant. I went without sleep for two days while I placed my daughter in hiding and lodged a number of complaints to relevant authorities, including to the NSW Police Commissioner. This was not the first time I had been forced to hide my children.

The offending officer effectively accused my child of committing a crime while in the care of her school. Consequently, the school became heavily involved. The school’s principal phoned police and told them it was impossible for our child to have come into contact with the missing phone. The senior investigating officer hung up on the principal who subsequently labelled her

“… a disgrace to the police force.”

My complaints resulted in a formal investigation  – which is ongoing – an apology of sorts and a police show bag being presented to my bewildered 10-year-old. Every investigating officer who attended our home said they had not witnessed the screen shot evidence. I have yet to be shown the alleged screen shot. I do not believe the evidence exists.

When I challenged the offending officer, by asking whether it was possible for someone to fabricate the screenshot, she agreed it “could be a possibility” but that in 20 years of policing she could not see why that would occur. After ten years of intense harassment from a variety of course, including the polices, I fully appreciate why someone would seek to fabricate evidence against my family.

Such as when police ambushed three family homes and held guns to my husband, I believe the iPhone incident was fabricated as a means of re-traumatising my family and silencing my witness testimony. Police demonstrated far more enthusiasm for investigating a missing pink iPhone 4, than the countless incidents of child abduction, rape and murder I witnessed as a child victim of an international sex trafficking ring.

In September 2015, despite having been warned three times by the Tweed Shire Council not to, the offending neighbour again deliberately coated my home in fibre glass debris. A lawyer subsequently advised me to attend the local Court and apply for an AVO. I followed this instruction.

Tweed Heads Court staff asked me whether my children would be included on the AVO, to which I replied:

“Absolutely.”

The Court then told me that only the police could take out the AVO. I said the police refused to do this. The Court instructed me to immediately march next door and ask the Tweed Heads police to take out the AVO on behalf of my family.

I followed this instruction also.

A senior Tweed Heads police officer told me there were insufficient recent incidents for police to take out an AVO, that what the neighbour did in October 2014 constituted sufficient grounds, that he could not understand why officers did not do so in 2014, and that I would have to wait for the neighbour to build up a “dossier” of offences and commit a serious act of violence against me or my family before police would act in our defence.

The officer provided me with yet another Event Number to add to my dossier: 61680488. He suggested that the neighbour continued to commit crimes against my family because I was “reactive”. His theory for criminal motivation is inconsistent with the neighbour’s surprise physical attack on my brother who had never previously met the offender and so no reaction could have preceded that assault.

In short, the NSW Police have instructed me to wait for a violent man to successfully seriously injure me or my children in another surprise, unprovoked assault.

Forget Al Qaeda. Our family lives with the tangible threat of being intermittently terrorised by certain police and random citizens. People, including police and therapists, have offered glib remedies to our predicament:

Just move house. Just act normal and polite when police turn up. Just ignore the neighbour. If you know you’re going to be attacked, just go on holiday.

We’ve tried all of that — and it doesn’t work. Such advice demonstrates ignorance of how elite crime rings operate. There is no avoiding an infinitely resourced network that has infiltrated every level of the Australian political and judicial system, as well as all the major establishment institutions. There is no reasoning with its members, whose confidence and arrogance stem from knowing they are protected.

The Australian public often say of child abuse victims:

Why didn’t they speak up? Why didn’t they go to the police? If paedophile rings are as widespread as victims claim, why can’t the public see any evidence of it?

Perhaps, after reading this article, people will better understand why.

I have endured decades of the types of incidents I describe here, including pet killings, attacks on my family and bizarre mistreatment from health professionals. I have experienced random, unprovoked attacks from complete strangers, an undesirable element within the police force and violent neighbours who suddenly migrate from significant childhood abuse locations. To the uninformed, these events appear to be mere coincidences or the result of something I must have done wrong. But to those with knowledge and experience, this is a recognisable pattern — themodus operandi of a powerful, well-funded child trafficking ring with a vested interest in silencing witnesses like me.

Therefore, when you see victims publicly testifying before the Royal Commission, or you encounter a masturbative collection of warm fuzzies boasting the title Messages to Australia, spare a thought for the voiceless mass of victims like me, whose testimonies were indeed reported but will never be publicly disclosed or addressed — thereby preserving the myth of the existence of such abuse.