Gossip Condemns Without a Trial

There’s a quote I used in an email on 8 October 2020, to the WHS and Wellbeing manager, while I was fighting to return to my work — the same work I’m still fighting to return to today.

It came from Brazilian author Paulo Coelho’s Manual of the Warrior of Light:

“The opponent is wise. Whenever he can, he makes use of the easiest and most effective of his weapons: gossip. It doesn’t take much effort to use it because others do the work for him. A few misdirected words can destroy months of dedication, years spent in search of harmony. The warrior of light is often the victim of this trick. He does not know where the blow came from and cannot prove that the gossip is false. Gossip does not allow him the right to defend himself; it condemns without a trial. When this happens, he puts up with the consequences and the undeserved punishment, for, as he well knows, words are powerful. But he suffers in silence and never uses the same weapon to hit back at his opponent. The warrior of light is not a coward.”

— Paulo Coelho, Manual of the Warrior of Light, p. 128.

I didn’t discover those words years later and decide that they fitted what had happened to me.

I was quoting them while it was happening.

And, importantly, I was quoting them while explicitly asking to be supported to return to my work.

I’m still asking for that return.

The passage of time hasn’t transformed my request into something that belongs in the past. My work, my professional role and my right to a safe return are precisely why the contemporaneous record matters so much.

By 8 October 2020, I was desperately trying to get back to the professional life I had built over two decades. I wasn’t writing about some abstract workplace disagreement. I was describing what it felt like to have my character, professionalism and humanity progressively displaced by other people’s narratives about me — narratives over which I seemed to have increasingly little control. 

That narrative was coming from a nationally registered publicly funded university employer with a commitment to the dignity of the human person in its Mission. It was mirrored by its specialised insurer, Catholic Church Insurance.

In that email, I wrote:

“I have been gossiped about, slandered, judged, discriminated, harassed, violated, disrespected, offensively labelled, demeaned, humiliated etc. My intelligence has also been insulted and I’ve been denied input and respectful communication to return to work in a safe environment. I’ve had enough.”

Those were my words at the time.

And then I quoted Coelho.

——

The cruelty of being condemned by a story you cannot see

There’s something uniquely destructive about gossip in organisational culture because it operates without ordinary safeguards.

You cannot correct a conversation you were never part of. 

(Eg. Between the SafeWork NSW inspector and National manager of employment relations and SAFETY who was the very cause of my claim).  

You cannot answer an allegation nobody puts to you. 

(Eg. Only to find out the “narrative” was created from private pastoral text message communication violated by HR executives, to weaponise, taking one text out of context. It’s a violation of the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and worse). 

You cannot provide context for a version of events you have never been allowed to hear. 

(Eg. See above example between a SafeWork inspector and the perpetrator I was seeking guarding from, the National manager of employment relations and safety). 

You cannot challenge assumptions that have already circulated through meetings, emails, conversations or professional relationships beyond your sight. 

(Eg. But the Right to Information SafeWork NSW GIPA request was very revealing. Another example, SIRA NSW taking the word of SafeWork NSW without any independent verification from either of these two regulators. Compliance on paper was all that mattered to SafeWork NSW. How can I ever forget being told by the inspector “well all they’ll do is show me their policies and I don’t want to ruffle feathers”. And what about Deepinder Miller’s seven page report of false information when no “assessment” took place. See http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/08/proof-of-medical-fraud-october-2020.html).

And yet you can live with their consequences.

That is what makes Coelho’s phrase so powerful:

“Gossip does not allow him the right to defend himself; it condemns without a trial.”

That was increasingly how I experienced the system around me.

People could form views about me.

People could speak about me.

People could make decisions affecting my employment, health, finances and future.

People could make a living out of unethically destroying my livelihood. 

But where was my voice?

Where was the transparent process in which I could sit down, explain what had actually happened and be heard as an intelligent professional with years of service and institutional knowledge?

Where was the basic human curiosity that asks:

What happened to her?

Rather than:

What is wrong with her?

Those are profoundly different questions.

——

Years of work can be damaged by a few words

Coelho writes:

“A few misdirected words can destroy months of dedication, years spent in search of harmony.”

For me, that sentence carried enormous weight.

I had been at my university since 2001.

My professional identity hadn’t appeared overnight. It had been built through years of work, relationships, institutional knowledge, responsibility and commitment.

And yet reputation is frighteningly fragile.

Years of demonstrated conduct can suddenly matter less than somebody else’s characterisation of you. 

(Eg. From HR and the National manager of employment relations and SAFETY’s unethical conduct, “on behalf” of the university’s senior executive group - refer to s.27 of the WHS Act 2011 (NSW) - there’s no excuse because they knew - Eg. see http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/04/vice-chancellor-on-notice-delivered.html). 

Once a label begins circulating, everything can be interpreted through it.

A person who keeps asking questions becomes “difficult.”

A person who insists upon being heard becomes “unreasonable.”

A person who documents what is happening becomes a “problem.”

A person who is distressed by what is happening can have the distress itself used to redefine them.

(NOTE - the biggest perpetrators of the above were SafeWork NSW and SIRA NSW). 

And eventually the original question disappears.

In my case, the original question was extraordinarily simple:

Why couldn’t I have a psychosocially safe workplace?

That should never have required years of fighting.

——

I was asking to go back — and I still am - my statutory right under a statutory scheme 

Perhaps the most important thing about that October 2020 email is what comes immediately after the Coelho quote.

I wrote:

“Tim, please support me to return to my work.”

That says everything.

Return to my work.

That was what I was asking for on 8 October 2020.

It’s what I’m still fighting for now.

I wasn’t writing as somebody who had abandoned my professional life, and I don’t accept a retrospective narrative that treats that professional life as something I simply walked away from or something that now belongs to the past.

I was trying to preserve it.

In the same correspondence, I said that I preferred to return to work and become a voice for a safer and more ethical organisation. I talked about participating in committees. I talked about enterprise bargaining. I talked about contributing to change.

Even after everything that had happened, my instinct was still constructive.

• I wanted the hazard addressed.
• I wanted a transparent investigation.
• I wanted respectful communication.
• I wanted support.
• I wanted a safe return to the workplace that had been part of my life since 2001.

I still do.

That’s why the historical record matters.

It’s very easy, years later, for what institutions subsequently did to a person to be treated as though it somehow proves what that person wanted at the time (nice try CCI, but that excuse won’t work either).

My contemporaneous words remove that ambiguity.

• I wanted to work.
• I wanted the workplace made safe.
• I wanted the problem properly investigated.
• I wanted to contribute to making the organisation better.
• And I wanted to return to my professional role.

Nothing about the years that have passed changes what I was asking for then — or what I continue to seek now.

——

Words are powerful

Coelho was right about something else:

Words are powerful.

They can destroy.

But they can also preserve the truth.

That’s one reason I write this blog.

For years, words have been written about me — in correspondence, reports, assessments, decisions and processes that have shaped my life. Many are dangerously inaccurate and defamatory.

This is where I get to write my own.

Not to become the thing that harmed me, but to place my own contemporaneous records alongside what happened and say:

This was my experience.

These were my words.

This is what I was asking for.

And there’s something particularly important about contemporaneous records.

Memory can be questioned. Motives can later be attributed. Histories can be rewritten. A person’s actions can be interpreted years later through the lens of everything that subsequently happened.

But there, in black and white, dated 8 October 2020, are my own words from the time.

I was asking for support to return to to my professional life in a safe work environment. 

——

Behind “the system” are human beings

There was another passage in that same email that now feels almost painfully prophetic.

Immediately before quoting Coelho, I wrote:

“Behind ‘the system’ are human beings. If people don’t give up from all the bullying, they give up because of ‘the system’. How unjust, inefficient and expensive.”

I understood something then that I understand even more profoundly now.

Systems don’t exist separately from human beings.

Every process has people making decisions within it.

Every letter has somebody who wrote it.

Every file has somebody responsible for reading it.

Every referral, delay, decision, investigation, assessment and response ultimately affects an actual human life.

When systems become so procedural that the human being disappears, something has gone terribly wrong.

I was never merely a number.

I was an employee.

A colleague.

A professional.

A person with a home, relationships, finances, responsibilities, hopes and a future.

And I was asking for help.

——

The warrior of light is not a coward

There’s another reason the final sentence of Coelho’s passage has stayed with me:

“The warrior of light is not a coward.”

Distress isn’t weakness.

Empathy isn’t weakness.

Wanting resolution isn’t weakness.

Trying repeatedly to resolve something without destroying other people isn’t weakness.

And asking for help is certainly not weakness.

In that same email, I wrote:

“Real empathy does not equate to weakness or illness.”

I believed that then.

I believe it now.

What I understand much more deeply today is the enormous damage that can occur when organisations and systems allow labels, assumptions and narratives to become substitutes for listening to the human being standing in front of them.

Behind every process, claim, file, report and number is a person.

A human being with a history.

A reputation.

Relationships.

A livelihood.

A home.

A future.

And a voice.

Mine was always there.

The tragedy is how hard I have had to fight simply to have it heard.

And on 8 October 2020, despite everything that had already happened, what I was asking for was remarkably simple:

“Tim, please support me to return to my work.”

Those words shouldn’t have had to be repeated years later.

But they do.

I am still trying to return to my work.

The fact that the fight has lasted this long doesn’t turn my valuable work into something that belongs only to my past.

It demonstrates just how long I have been fighting to get back to it.