Dicey Heydon … Time and tide in the affairs of men … Industrial scale sexual harassment from the High & Mighty … “Inadvertent and unintended” … Who knew what and when … More to come … The masked man … From Ginger Snatch, who associates with judges 

Rachael Patterson Collins in 2005, Alex Eggerking in 2011 and Chelsea Tabart in 2012. 

According to the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age’s bombshell report by Kate McClymont and Jacqueline Maley there were others who ultimately also spoke about Heydon’s unwanted attentions. 

A barrister, now a District Court judge, found his hand sliding between her thighs at a dinner. He forcibly tried to kiss local law society president Noor Bloomer in 2013 at a Canberra University law ball, and at the same event he “behaved inappropriately” towards two young students and was asked to leave. He forcibly kissed a female barrister in his High Court chambers, he had his hands down the pants of another lawyer, and sexually groped a student in the Bodleian law library at Oxford. 

That’s just for starters. More is coming down the pipeline. It seems that Dyse rarely let a moment pass when he would not be attempting to wrap his hands or his lips around an unsuspecting victim who found herself within range the great jurist. 

His attempted seductions took place in cars, at formal dinners, at balls, in his chambers, at the Commonwealth Club, in restaurants, in bars, in libraries. Nowhere was off-limits. 

The quality of his pick-up lines also left much to be desired: 

The women on the receiving end of this might have felt as though they were trapped in a Vincent Price horror movie. 

Heydon was the Capital C conservative of the “modern” era, beloved by Winston Howard and the Mad Monk Abbott. 

Few can forget his job application speech at the Quadrant dinner on October 30, 2002 where he denounced judicial activism and made barbed remarks about Anthony Mason, Bill Deane and Michael Kirby. 

Unforgivably, his jokes were tired and recycled, yet the desiccated guests guffawed and wheezed with delight at his bitchiness. Quadrant gingerly excised some of the nastiest bits when it published a report of his speech just after his appointment to the High Court was announced.  

Happily, Justinian was able to remedy the bowdlerisation and publish the bits that went onto the cutting room floor. 

Then there was his bizarre decision to speak at a Liberal Party fundraiser while sitting as Abbott’s attack dog on the royal commissioner into trade union governance and corruption.

In his Quadrant speech Heydon himself referred to the essential judicial virtue of “probity”, and how it can be damaged by various “pressures”. 

In July 2011 he gave the eulogy at St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney for Roderick Pitt Meagher’s two hour funeral mass, with all the overblown campiness that attends such a jamboree. 

He said that Roddy obscured his true nature with a mask he fashioned himself. Mistakenly, “people took the mask to be the real man”. 

“If there is one word that could sum-up Roddy it was ‘misunderstood’ …” 

And now, in a grotesque turn of events, the mask that Heydon fashioned for himself has slipped and we see the real man. 

What is it about people like Howard, Abbott and Brandis who cleave to the Heydons, Pells and Meaghers of the world, emblems of the decomposing core of conservative “values” in this country. 

The High Court dealt with the complaints as a domestic matter. It accepted the statements of the associates that the former judge was a sexual harasser. In doing so it occupied a different firmament to that which saw the judges overturn the conviction of George Pell, rejecting the victim’s sworn evidence and the jury’s finding. 

Fortunately, the court on this occasion rose to the occasion, in sharp distinction to the occasion when, with the exception of Mary Gaudron, the judges turned their back on Michael Kirby after he was falsely accused in parliament of impropriety by Howard’s Mr Fix-It, Senator Bill Heffernan. 

On Monday (June 22) the NSW bar issued a coy statement without mentioning the name of its member from 8th floor Selborne Chambers who has blotted its escutcheon. The Law Council was more robust in its condemnation.  

Heydon denied the allegations, issuing a statement to the Sydney Morning Herald through tax lawyers Speed & Stracey, run by Robin Speed a campaigner for various conservative causes including against marriage equality. 

The law shop contends that Dyse didn’t get a fair shake because the High Court’s internal inquiry was “conducted by a public servant and not by a lawyer, judge or a tribunal member. It was conducted without having statutory powers of investigation and of administering affirmations or oaths”.

“The inquiry did not afford any opportunity for representatives of the person complained of to confront those complaining or to cross-examine them.

Our client says that if any conduct of his has caused offence, that result was inadvertent and unintended, and he apologises for any offence caused. We have asked the High Court to convey that directly to the Associate complainants.

As to the balance of your claims our client denies emphatically any allegation of sexual harassment or any offence.” 

Also, “any allegation of predatory behaviour or breaches of the law is categorically denied by our client”.

Who knew what and when about Heydon’s wandering hands will emerge more fully. By various accounts the women were emboldened to speak out eight to fifteen years after the event because the social order was changing fast. 

The #MeToo movement gave them an assurance that wasn’t available when a giant of the legal profession was busily disrupting their career prospects. 

It’s a tragedy for those bright young things who said they abandoned their ambitions after realising their hopelessness in a face of a rampant protected species. 

It’s also unsettling for his family and those who care about him. 

In a 2002 equity decision from the NSW Court of Appeal in a case called Harris v Digital Pulse Pty Ltd, Heydon made what now seems like a startling remark when getting to grips with whether there should be exemplary damages in equity: 

In short, equity does not bear the same relationship to the instinct for revenge as the institution of marriage does the sexual appetite.” 

It is widely rumoured that Dyson Heydon is the godson of Bob Menzies, his father being a cog in an early Liberal government. 

He went to St Paul’s Collage at the University of Sydney, where on Commem Day he rode on a float dressed as a Russian peasant woman. 

There are so many masks and so little explanation.