The JENNIFER EFFECT

Human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson and author Kathy Lette know each other's deepest secrets. We ask them to share some here

- Kathy Lette

Jennifer Robinson has spent many hours describing home. From the salty spray of Seven Mile Beach to the bush ballads of birds at Bomaderry Creek, stories from her sleepy home town on the South Coast of New South Wales were a prized commodity for her high-profile client and fellow Australian Julian Assange during his years in exile. For 12 years, as the WikiLeaks founder moved from political asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy to a highsecurity London prison, he would beg his lawyer for stories of home.

On June 26, Robinson brought Assange back to Australian soil after a politically charged legal battle. Assange had been avoiding extradition to the United States for publishing leaked government documents, and at one point was facing sexual assault charges in Sweden, which were eventually dropped.

The esteemed human rights lawyer has been taking on untouchable cases for the past two decades, and she represented Amber Heard in her ex-husband Johnny Depp’s UK libel lawsuit against The Sun newspaper in 2020. When Heard received death threats, so did Robinson. But nothing will silence her. She’s a passionate advocate for Australia’s public education system, First Nations rights and ending domestic violence.

Fresh from the fight for Assange’s freedom, Robinson stands on the familiar shoreline for her marie claire shoot. It’s only for a fleeting moment: as soon as we wrap, she’s on a flight back to the UK. There, she sits down with her long-time friend Kathy Lette, the author of 20 best-selling books including Puberty Blues and The Revenge Club, for a candid conversation about public scrutiny, being the A-list’s go-to lawyer and “swinging from chandeliers with cocktails in our teeth”.