Mariya Taylor, who now lives on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, did not expect to have to talk to the media, to have her image broadcast. But after losing her case on a point of law earlier this year, Taylor chose to identify herself. When the #MeToo movement exploded late last year, there was much talk that women would come forward with baseless stories of harassment, for a shot at fame, or notoriety. This idea seems ludicrous as I sit opposite Taylor on a hot Queensland afternoon, at the house she shares with her partner and their teenaged son. 'I WAS NAIVE' We sit in the lush tropical garden Taylor has built since she and her family moved here a decade ago. It was Taylor's green thumb that brought her to the Air Force in the first place, more than 30 years ago. In the mid-1980s, she was working in horticulture near Hobsonville, and knew many of the young people working at the air force base. She was young and fit; the career path was attractive. In 1985 Taylor joined up and completed her basic training. Pictures from the early part of her three years' service show a smiling young airwoman, not yet out of her teens.

"I was 18 years old and very naive,'' she says of her teenage self. But initially, life in the Air Force was a joy, and a career she fully expected to spend the next 20 years building. "I loved it, I absolutely loved it", says Taylor of her first posting, as a motor transport driver at Whenuapai. Her Sergeant was Robert Roper. Mariya Taylor in her garden in Queensland. Taylor describes Roper as "another level altogether", someone she had an intense fear of throughout her time at the base. There was no question, however, of disobeying a superior.

"I had just come off the recruit course and we were taught we were always to do what our superiors told us to do. We were taught to always follow orders." Taylor says Roper's behaviour towards female underlings at the base was well known. He would pull bra straps, pinch bottoms, push open the door of the airwomen's change rooms while they were dressing. He did not hide his actions, Taylor says – they took place out in the open, for all to see. But before long, Taylor became a particular target of Roper's attention. "In the early afternoon the senior NCOs (non-commissioned officers) would leave our section and and they would go down to the Sergeants' mess and they would drink all afternoon. "Early evening, the Section would get a phone call and he (Roper) would specifically ask for a lift home from me.

"When I went to pick him up he was extremely intoxicated. The minute the car started he would lock the car doors and start abusing me." Taylor has had to describe the deeply personal details of what happened in that car in the High Court, under cross examination and with her identity protected, but speaking them out loud, publicly, is quite obviously still difficult for her. "He would put his hand up my skirt, he would be groping my breasts, groping my inner thighs", she says. "When I would reach for the RT to call for help, he would squeeze my arm so hard. When I arrived at his house he would put his hand on me and squeeze my upper arm tightly, and tell me that this was to go no further. If I said anything, he would ruin my career. "When I got back to base I would be crying and hysterical and often the boys in the section would offer to drive instead of me, to protect me." Taylor says Roper harassed other women as well, but he seemed to have a particular wish to bully and intimidate her, in increasingly bizarre ways. On several occasions, Taylor says she was locked inside a wire-mesh storage area in the transport division tyre bay by Roper. He would rub himself against her from behind, and poke her on the buttocks with a tyre iron.

While inspecting troops during transport division parades, he would leer at her when he looked her up and down. Taylor was terrified. "Knowing what he'd done to me in the car the previous night under the influence of alcohol, I felt intimidated and degraded. He had total control of me in these situations. This power made him fearless, and excited him. It still makes me shiver from head to toe. I can still hear him and smell his strong aftershave as if it was yesterday." Robert Roper. Despite her fear of Roper, Taylor says she did complain, several times, including to her superior at a performance review. Each time, Roper was spoken to and claimed Taylor was "lippy and opinionated". These complaints, and those of others, went no further Taylor says, and she still wonders why so many of her superiors turned a blind eye. After almost three years in the services she could take it no more – she resigned and fled to London, staying away for more than seven years. In the 1990s she came back to Whenuapai, as a civilian worker but the memories were too much to bear. She turned her back on the force altogether, and tried to put the past to bed.

'I FELT ANGRY THAT I HAD NEVER BEEN HEARD' It's an unusual thing, for a victim of sexual assault to ask for their statutory name suppression to be lifted. The case of Robert Roper is unusual in the extreme, therefore: Mariya Taylor is the fourth of his victims to ask the court for it. The first three included Karina Andrews and Tracey Thompson, Roper's two daughters, who had name suppression lifted in 2015 after giving evidence at Roper's trial for raping and sexually assaulting them when they were children. Roper was convicted and jailed, but Tracey, Karina and their friend Cherie Ham felt the Defence Force had ignored it's own responsibility in the case and wanted to speak out for change. It was the news of Roper's conviction that galvanised Taylor, thousands of kilometres away in Australia, into action. "I just froze. I felt absolutely sick. All the emotions came flooding back. I felt angry that I had never been heard as a young airwoman and I felt guilty ... if I had been heard, those children would have had a better life."

She initially made a police complaint, giving a formal statement to Queensland police in June 2015, just weeks before an independent inquiry was commissioned by the Defence Force into how it handles complaints of sexual assault and harassment. But with Roper already in jail serving a 13 year sentence, Taylor decided to sue the Defence Force (through the Attorney General) and Roper for compensation instead. Her lawyer, Geraldine Whiteford, says the trial was a "massive ordeal" for Taylor. "One amazing thing about Mariya stands out to me as a lawyer – she is a diligent client, and I think that would have been a feature of her service in the Air Force, too. She was determined to please and would have been a stunning employee. "But despite being so brave and dealing with everything, I always thought she was incredibly fragile". Whiteford says Taylor's distress became increasingly obvious throughout the trial.

"She sat with her back to Roper in the witness box, but perhaps because he was being brought to court from prison, there was always a lot of clanking and noise when he came in, and when she heard him she would start to cry. It was miserable for her. "She had close supporters with her, and without them I doubt she could have got through the doors of the court. It would have taken huge bravery, but despite all that she was a careful witness". Geraldine Whiteford does not believe her client launched the case on a whim. The Hobsonville base. "She doesn't take her decisions lightly. She agonises over them. She thinks deeply and wants to see justice done."

In defending Taylor's claim, counsel for the Defence Force denied knowledge of any pattern of systematic inappropriate behaviour by Roper, and said there was no evidence Taylor had suffered trauma as a result of her experiences. It denied any breach of a duty of care, or that the Crown was "vicariously liable for any of the acts of the first defendant (Roper)". In her ruling, Justice Rebecca Edwards finds Roper groped Taylor as she drove him home from the Sergeant's mess, and locked her in the tyre cage on more than one occasion. The ruling also states that Taylor's claims that Roper rubbed himself against airwomen, pulled on bra straps and ogled her on parade were corroborated in court by evidence from her co-workers. However, Justice Edwards said Taylor's claim that she had complained to her superiors, was "undermined by the lack of any documentary record of a complaint being made", along with testimony from her seniors at the time, who also denied taking a formal complaint from her. Evidence given by a fellow airman who said the formal complaint he made was "screwed up and thrown in the bin" in front of him, was discounted. Her ruling states there was "insufficient evidence to conclude, on the balance of probabilities, that M did make a formal complaint about Mr Roper's conduct at the time." In the end, Justice Edwards found that Taylor's claim was barred by the Limitation Act, which states that a claim must be brought within six years of the original actions. So now, Taylor is headed to the Court of Appeal.

COSTS CLAIM BY RAPIST Taylor and her family readily admit they can't pay the kinds of costs the Defence Force and Robert Roper are demanding of her. She already fears she will lose her home, having staked it against the Defence Force's demand for security of courts costs. An appeal, and the potential to have the Edwards decision overturned, is her only hope. When I ask Taylor how she feels about having to ask the public for help, she seems deeply embarrassed. "It's really hard to ask for help, but it's just that this is an amount of money I can't come up with myself. We've spent so much money getting to where we are".