I asked if he went to the driver’s side, and he said, ‘No. Last thing I see, the lady grab his arm. She angry with him.’
I said the passenger was Hallwright’s daughter, who was 16.
‘No!’ he shouted. ‘Lie! One hundred per cent lie! He talked to the judges, he say his daughter there. They say, “Okay.” But the lady almost 40 years. Not his daughter. Lie!’
Why lie?
‘I don’t know! He’s very popular guy. I think it’s his girlfriend or something like that. I think so.’
He mentioned Hallwright talking to the judge; did he think the judge was in on it, that he and Hallwright knew each other?
‘I think so. They seem to. But we don’t have any evidence . . . Police, judges, he give to them, I think!’ He mimed passing money under the table. ‘I don’t trust this fucken country! No justice! No honest peoples!’
At such times he was infantile, a loose unit. His injuries made him a pitiful sight, but he was belligerent, unstable. He said he’d had nine operations in New Zealand, and cursed his surgeons; the tenth operation was in Korea, and he claimed it cost a staggering $100,000.
I spoke with Korean lawyer Ken Oh, from Kenton Chambers, who dealt with Kim. He said, ‘Mr Kim wanted to have surgery in Korea because so many people there have car accidents and medical people there have more practical experience than in New Zealand. So many people, so many cars, so many accidents! The surgeons are much, much better than in your country. So Mr Kim come to see me and talk about how to recover at least that amount.’
How?
‘He wanted to sue.’
5
Everything that Hallwright did after he hit Kim was a tactical mistake of some sort. He made no mention of it to Forsyth Barr. He regarded it as a matter outside of work, and a minor matter at that: ‘A policeman at the scene said there’d probably have to be charges under the Transport Act.’
But even when the police laid serious criminal charges — reckless driving, and intent to injure — Hallwright remained silent. He fought hard for name suppression, taking it to the High Court, but that only inspired the wrath of Whaleoil, Cameron Slater’s fulminating blog, which has made a crusade of taunting those who try to hide behind gagging orders.
Forsyth Barr’s managing director, Neil Paviour-Smith, first heard that one of his employees was facing serious criminal charges when he was shown a post on Whaleoil.
‘Neil was so angry that he’d had to find out through the blog,’ said a former colleague. ‘He was pissed off about that, big time. Guy needed to come clean. He needed to get it out in the open.’
But the company took no immediate action, and viewed him as innocent until proven otherwise. If the jury had reached a verdict of not guilty at his criminal trial, it was ‘entirely possible’ that he’d have kept his job, the Employment Court heard. Hallwright assured the firm that he would be acquitted, and carried on with his duties all throughout 2011.
PR trout Tina Symmans, a director at Forsyth Barr, told the Employment Relations Authority hearing that she had met Hallwright at a social function around that time, and tried to offer her advice. He waved it away, saying he was confident of acquittal.
‘I was astounded by . . . his arrogance in thinking that this really didn’t matter . . . He insisted that it wasn’t his fault and that the Asian man was to blame. Given his approach, it’s unsurprising the media gave the matter the prominence they did.’
In fact, his ‘approach’ was to tell her exactly what he thought, and to present the facts as he saw them. But was he really so blasé? The stress of waiting for the trial led him to begin counselling. I asked if he was living in dread back then, and he said, ‘Oh yeah. It was a big thing to have hanging over your head. A huge strain.’
Hallwright engaged the services of Paul Davison QC. ‘He said I had a very strong chance of beating the intent to injure thing, and the other one, reckless driving, was kind of each way.’
The trial finally took place in March 2012. The judge dropped the charges of intent to injure, but the jury found Hallwright guilty of reckless driving causing grievous bodily harm.
‘I was shocked. Very shocked. That felt terrible. Absolutely terrible.’
The hits just kept coming. Forsyth Barr began termination proceedings; Davison, as his lawyer, urged them to hold off until sentencing. That was another bombshell.
Hallwright’s sentence, 250 hours’ community work, was lenient. But the real offence was caused by the judge, Raoul Neave, when he took it into his head to excoriate the media for their ‘puerile’ coverage of Hallwright’s saga. He got that right. But he was buying a fight that only served to get Hallwright beat up on all over again.
Neave said, ‘When it became apparent you had come into contact with Mr Kim, you called the police and in every sense seem to have behaved in a responsible fashion.’ It wasn’t what anyone wanted to hear; with friends like Neave, Hallwright attracted even more enemies. A witness to the incident, pizza-maker Giampiero De Falco, ran to the Weekend Herald and gave them a great quote for the front page: ‘If it’s not hit-and-run, what the hell is it?’
Neave also described Hallwright as someone with an ‘impeccable reputation’. He got that right, too, but it led to howls of outrage, and was perceived as old-boy cronyism at its worst — one law for the poor, one for the rich.
The Auckland Council for Civil Liberties jumped on the bandwagon. Council president Barry Wilson wrote to the solicitor-general, asking for the sentence to be appealed.
Why? The council’s interest in the affair was almost frivolous, certainly unbalanced. Wilson took a statement from Kim, but didn’t read the court transcripts, just the press reports. He told me, ‘I think I looked at the press
