The night I finished the last page of Prima Facie, one line kept spinning in my head—what Tessa says in the courtroom:
“The law requires consistency of evidence. But trauma is not consistent.”
I realized such confidence is itself a privilege. Only someone who fundamentally doesn’t believe this could happen to her has the nerve to say, “I’ll handle it perfectly.” And Tessa uses her entire story to tell me: when you’re actually standing in those ruins, you can’t even stand steady. Where would you find the strength to protect yourself?
She was a formidable force in the law. In the end, the law pierced her through
Tessa is a woman who crawled out of a Liverpool slum. She used her brain to get into Cambridge Law, her grit to stand firm at a top firm, and her voice to win case after case. Many of the cases she handled were sexual assault defenses. Across from her, in the plaintiff’s seat, sat woman after woman, face wet with tears. Tessa watched them cry, and what she thought was: your third paragraph and your fifth paragraph don’t line up. You took a shower afterward, so the evidence is gone. You were drunk, so your memory isn’t reliable. She didn’t lie or fabricate. She just took apart their inconsistencies with surgical precision. That was her job. She was good at it.
Until that night, she said no—very clearly. But Julian didn’t stop. Tessa did everything she had ever told victims not to do. She didn’t call the police right away. She knew better than anyone that she needed to preserve the evidence. But her body wouldn’t listen. That trained, elite lawyer disappeared that night. What remained was a woman crouched on the bathroom floor, scrubbing her own arms raw. By the time she finally stood up and walked to the police station, she knew there wasn’t much evidence left to use.
On the scales of the law, a victim’s tears are not weighed
The most suffocating part of this book is the moment Tessa steps into the courtroom. Every question lands like a precise jab, hitting her where it hurts most. And she can’t dodge a single one. Because those questions, legally speaking, are entirely reasonable. She did drink a lot. She did open the door herself. She did take a shower. One by one, those facts are pulled out and pieced together into a picture that says, “Tessa is lying.”
The author herself comes from a legal background. She spent fifteen years on the front lines of legal aid and handled too many cases like this one. She knows that when a victim walks into a courtroom, she isn’t facing justice. She’s facing a set of rules built from male experience. Those rules demand that the victim be emotionally stable. Have a clear memory. Behave perfectly. But someone who has just been violated? Her memory is shattered. Her emotions are wrecked. She doesn’t even know who she is. When the law uses its standard of “reason” to measure someone who has been torn apart, that person is guaranteed to fail.
That light came from the witness stand
There’s a passage Tessa speaks in the courtroom that I read over and over. She says that the law was built by generation after generation of men. It was never designed to accommodate the physical experience of women. She lost the case. Insufficient evidence. Julian walked free. But while she was speaking those words, many women in that courtroom were listening. The female journalist in the press section. The female student in the gallery. The woman mopping the floor. They looked at Tessa, and something in their eyes began to brighten.
Although the law didn’t give her justice, she gave the women in the courtroom something else. Visibility. To see someone standing in the witness stand, speaking out loud, sentence by sentence, a pain that usually can’t be spoken. That act alone already changed some of them.
