Taxpayers will have to foot the legal bill of a female ex-teacher whose charges over the alleged historical sex abuse of three male students were cleared because of her gender.
Helga Lam, a former teacher at a Sydney boys’ school, had been accused of 15 counts of indecent assault on four students for alleged offences dating back to 1978.
But before the matter could go to trial, the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed all the charges after finding the relevant 1970s law only applied to men abusing boys.
The legislation at the time, which was repealed in 1984, was directed towards the “crime of sodomy upon a male and other male homosexual conduct”, the court found.
Today, the same court granted a certificate ordering that Lam’s legal costs be paid by the state.
Prosecutors could not have been reasonable in charging the ex-teacher for crimes she could not have committed because the law did not apply to her, three judges on the appeals panel unanimously decided.
Claims against Lam included penile-vaginal intercourse with the complainants, as well as masturbating them, performing fellatio on them and telling them to perform sex acts on her.
At the time of the alleged offending, the students were aged between 13 and 16.
In May, a second female teacher, Gaye Grant, was cleared of historical sexual abuse on the same grounds.
Grant had been jailed for six years in December 2022 after pleading guilty to maintaining an unlawful sexual relationship with a boy in the 1970s.
She spent almost 15 months behind bars before being released on bail ahead of the charge being quashed.
