Part 2: Nina Funnell Has A New Fight. This One Will Shock You
4/29/202642 min
This is Part 2 of Nina Funnell’s story. You can listen to Part 1 here.
Nina Funnell survived a violent assault as a young woman, fighting off her attacker and escaping to call the police. Although he was never found, the experience became a turning point.
Within weeks, she chose to speak publicly, challenging stigma, victim-blaming, and the silence surrounding violence against women. Since then, Nina has become a leading advocate and journalist, driving national conversations and legal reform.
Through campaigns like Let Her Speak and Justice Shouldn’t Hurt, she has helped change laws, amplify survivor voices, and secure millions in funding for victim support services.
Today, she joins us to discuss her work supporting victim-survivors and their families, and the fight for a more just system.
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CREDITS
Guest: Nina Funnell
Host: Gemma Bath
Senior Producer: Tahli Blackman
Group Executive Producer: Ilaria Brophy
Video Editor: Julian Rosario
Audio Engineer: Jacob Round
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsGemma Bath· Host0:00
This is part two of my conversation with Nina Funnell. Before you listen to this, make sure you've listened to part one. There's a link in our show notes. Before you listen today, this episode contains stories of child sexual abuse, sexual assault, and suicide. I wanna move on to another huge campaign [laughs] that you worked on, the Let Her Speak, which turned into the Let Us Speak campaign. Where did that start for you?
Nina Funnell· Guest0:26
Okay. So interestingly, that actually also started in that year of university reporting.
Gemma Bath· Host0:30
Did it?
Nina Funnell· Guest0:30
Yeah. So, um, back in 2016, '17 when I was doing all of that work, I got a phone call from, um, the student women's offices at the University of Tasmania to tell me that there was a convicted sex offender living on campus in one of the residential colleges, I think it was John Flynn Residential College. Um, and he was an elderly convicted child sex offender, and his name's Nicholas Bester, and he was living in coed facilities, and he was making a number of the students on campus feel very, very uncomfortable, and they didn't understand why he was living alongside 17 and 18-year-old girls in... And I mean, they had shared bathroom facilities as well.
Gemma Bath· Host1:10
Yeah.
Nina Funnell· Guest1:10
And he was, I think, a 68-year-old man at the time. Anyway, I said, "Yeah, I'll, I'll do that story as part of the 52," and then I said, um, "But I just wanna check, how do his original victims," because he'd been to jail, I said, "How do, how do, do, do you know who that is? Do you know how they feel about this? Do you know if they feel comfortable with the story