Helga Lam: Teacher cleared of abuse on gender grounds seeks costs

An ex-teacher who had multiple sexual abuse charges quashed because of her gender wants taxpayers to cover her hefty legal bill for defending the now-failed criminal prosecution.

Helga Lam, a former teacher at a Sydney boys’ school, had been charged with 15 counts of indecent assault on four boys for alleged offences dating back to 1978.

Before the matter could go to trial, Lam applied to have the case thrown out but was knocked back in the NSW District Court.

That decision was overturned in February, when the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed all charges and found 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The legislation at the time, which was repealed in 1984, was directed towards the “crime of sodomy upon a male and other male homosexual conduct,” the court found.

Lam and her legal counsel have since made an application for taxpayers to pay the legal costs of defending the charges.

They appeared in the appeal court on Thursday, when the matter was adjourned to give prosecutors time to consider whether they consented to the ex-teacher’s legal bid.

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 as Lam.

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.

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