Artist Anthony Lister found not guilty

Eleven years ago, artist Anthony Lister was riding high. The Sydney Morning Herald published this front-page article proclaiming the street artist had captured the world stage and was being exhibited around the world.

They called him "Australia's Banksy" and described his mighty legal battles trying to stop the local council painting over his famous murals adorning abandoned buildings in his hometown of Brisbane.

You can view some of his extraordinary creations on his website here.

There's a documentary about his early work and the impact on his family life called Have you seen the Listers which featured for years on the Netflix platform. It's now on YouTube here. This focussed on his young family struggling to survive in a world centred around his studios full of partying people, drugs, and many, many young women keen to hang onto the coattails of this talented high-flying man.

But then his life came crashing down.

In 2020 Anthony Lister's home was raided by a 23-man task force – including police armed with sub machine guns - who had come to arrest him for sexual assault. They broke down his door before carting him off to the police station to confront hordes of media salivating over this latest #MeToo salvo. The press were given access to photos of him being locked up.

The story of what happened to Lister is just appalling. His arrest was the result of a coordinated campaign by young women determined to take him down. The charges ranged from touching a breast, to throwing a woman across the room and violently raping her. All of these accusations were ultimately discredited in court and dismissed by two juries.

Late last year a Sydney jury took only a few minutes to throw out the last of these allegations – but that decision has, unsurprisingly, been ignored by our mainstream media. The very same media which, anticipating a conviction, had published story after story reporting in salacious detail the allegations these women were making.

The witch-hunt resulted in 5 years of hell for Lister and his family. He was arrested 15 times and spent 83 days in prison. His exhibitions were attacked and closed down, his art defaced, he was debanked by two banking institutions, photographers stalked him everywhere he went. His private address was published on social media, death threats posted on his front door. A shop even promoted a "Kill your local Lister" tattoo.

I've made a video with Lister talking about this whole extraordinary story. Please watch it and circulate it to your networks. There's much to be learnt from his revelations about being ripped off by lousy lawyers, how bail conditions set him up for repeat imprisonment, the horrors of our prisons, five years of hounding by the press, and the devastation of a hung jury after a 6-week criminal trial in 2024 – which led to the final trial last year.

I think you'll find Lister's story most compelling, and an important expose of how our justice system is being hijacked by feminist ideology determined to take down prominent men. It's very important you help me promote it so that Lister's innocence is well publicised.

It is simply outrageous that our media has failed so dismally to expose how the evidence of these complainants was roundly rejected by a jury. The media naturally failed to report that several complainants were confronted with proof that their version of events was untrue, in devastating cross-examination by Margaret Cunneen SC.

The one-eyed journalists – from the ABC, The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), The Guardian and the like – crusaded against a suppression order which was imposed to protect Lister's identity, long after the news of his arrest had been broadcast worldwide. Eventually that suppression order was lifted but the judge, Michael John King, took the very unusual step of commenting on the unbalanced coverage of the case, which failed to include all Lister's acquittals in earlier trials. He mentioned he was so disappointed in the SMH that he had just cancelled his subscription!

Astoundingly, SMH journalist, Clare Sibthorpe, said in court she wasn't interested in covering the verdict if Lister was acquitted. And sure enough, the paper has refused to publish the fact that the jury ultimately threw it all out. (I urge you to write to the SMH editor, Jordan Baker – here - to complain.)

The current slogan being used to advertise the Sydney Morning Herald is "Here's to reason" – claiming to make a "powerful statement on the value of balanced, responsible journalism in a deeply polarised world." What a joke!

There's an interesting back story to my involvement in this case. Anthony Lister's mother became involved in setting up Mothers of Sons, the website campaigning for fair treatment for men in our courts. She contacted us initially about another son who was confronted by false rape allegations being made in a family law battle by his disturbed, drug-addicted ex-partner – read the whole dreadful saga here.

Nearly four years later I had a phone call from this mother, telling me that now her other son, Anthony, was under siege. Worse, they were running out of money having given over half a million dollars to the major Sydney criminal law firm which had failed dismally to look after him.

In the end the brilliant barrister Margaret Cunneen SC stepped in to help him, and it was her team's hard work and her expert handling of the jury which led to the final acquittal on all remaining charges. Here they are after the verdict:

What really saved Lister was he had the proof to show the accusations were based on total lies. That was the amazing thing. Lister records everything in his life. It started as a boy when he videoed his latest skateboard moves but then he found it helpful to keep track of progress in his art. So, the camera was always on, recording everything that happened in his studios and everywhere else he went.

It was all there – over 30 hard drives of data, including all his social media messages. Everything he needed to disprove the allegations the young women were making. Naturally, the police weren't interested in his side of the story, and the prosecution built their case against him using the carefully edited social media messages produced by his accusers. It was Cunneen's team that did the hard work of compiling all the proof that brought these women undone.

• Like the complainant who claimed Lister had assaulted her…but he was able to produce a message from her saying something like "that was the best day of my life… he didn't even try to fuck me."

• Allegations of sexual assault given in a trembling voice by a complainant dressed in pigtails were undermined when the jury watched her in an explicit video showing raunchy, consensual sex with Lister.

• Another complainant claimed to be horrified about his bag of drugs but then the next day she was shown to be snorting ketamine off the table, and then later changing her evidence saying, "Oh, forgive me for that, I was on acid at the time."

• One woman accused him of locking her in her bedroom while he had a crew from an overseas fashion magazine visiting his home. Photographic evidence proved that the only lock on the bedroom door was in fact a simple latch lock on the inside of the door.

• Then there was the vital sequence where an accuser claimed to have been raped before parading around in a wedding dress as he worked in his studio. He was able to produce vision of her in the dress as the artwork progressed, long after she said she'd fled from the scene after the alleged rape.

• One complainant wrongly claimed Lister had offered her an internship. Messages were produced showing her begging for him to give her one. "INTERN ME!" she demanded in a text message.

That was one of the intriguing themes in the case. Here was the prosecutor claiming there was a power imbalance with this man taking advantage of his fame to bully women into sexual favours. But the reality was the women who ended up as complainants were all wannabee artists who were desperate for this man's attention. And the evidence was there that they actively pursued him to try to help their careers – a theme we've all seen before, particularly in the Weinstein case. See these comments from the trial:

"I was really just going along with it, sort of the whole time I was just doing whatever and hoped that it would get me opportunities or something".

"Well, I couldn't imagine hanging out with him if I didn't think it would have some sort of benefit on my career."

So why did these doting fans turn on him? Margaret Cunneen made the case in her summing up that Lister had consensual sex with the women who had "admired" or "idolised" him because of his fame, and that some reinterpreted events after feeling "heartbroken" and betrayed by his behaviour – when it turned out he was also having sex with other women or had no interest in a proper relationship with them.

"Poor X thought that she was going to be the girlfriend, really. She thought that there was a romantic aspect to it, and that's what she was expecting, and then she got a broken heart because there were other women and that was awful," was how Cunneen described one such reaction.

Disappointing, yes. But it is a sad reflection on our times that these women were prepared to try to gang together to try to destroy the man who had let them down. Five, six years after the alleged events, these mid-twenties women were prepared to dress up in pigtails and clutch teddy bears to peddle their implausible stories in front of a jury. And now, even though he has been found not guilty, they are still out there lobbying in "survivor" groups claiming our courts let them down. 

These women were part of a mob prepared to adorn Lister's front door with "Rapist lives here" signs, deface his famous street art, close down his exhibitions, demand his art was removed from galleries. For year after year, they were out there, trying to destroy his life. But ultimately, they came undone.

Three cheers for the good sense of that jury which ignored the pleas of the prosecutor claiming it is "antiquated thinking" - promotion of those much despised "rape myths" - to make assumptions about how rape victims should behave. He tried to convince the jury that it was normal for a woman to keep sending Lister messages asking to see him for years after the alleged rape. Going to visit him, sending him topless pictures of herself, having sex with him in a hotel. Somehow, they were supposed to believe that didn't undermine her story that he'd attacked her. The jury wasn't having a bar of it and took only a matter of minutes to dismiss the prosecution case.

Such women, fuelled by our complicit, male-hating media, are a menace to our society. That's why we have to all work hard to expose this stunning victory over their evil campaign to lock up Anthony Lister.

This talented man needs to be allowed to get on with his life and keep inspiring us with his stimulating, life-affirming art. That won't happen if they have succeeded in permanently blackening his name.