After waiting eight years, Ben Roberts-Smith knew the day he had long feared was nearing when his lawyer received an email last November from Stephen McIntyre, a homicide detective assigned to what looks like could be one of the most dramatic murder trials in modern Australian history.
The veteran policeman gave Mr Roberts-Smith a last chance to explain what happened in Afghanistan before he advised the Federal Director of Public Prosecutions, Raelene Sharp, whether to charge the war hero with murder.
In a case where the stakes couldn’t be higher, the emails contained sobering news. The Office of Special Investigator — an organisation given $250 million to go after special forces veterans — was clearly pursuing murder allegations made against the Victoria Cross awardee.
Mr Roberts-Smith and his partner, sports marketer Sarah Matulin, had been trying to rebuild their lives, and finances, after his failed lawsuit. A High Court appeal had wiped out most of his savings. He owned no substantial assets and didn’t have a job.
The allegations made securing regular employment impossible. He considered buying an avocado farm in Myanmar, a country in south-east Asia racked by an insurgency. He scoped out fitness businesses for sale in Spain. He met the chief executive of a business that sells outdoor shades in Thailand.
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Over seven years he travelled overseas 28 times. Usually, when he left and arrived in Australia, immigration officers asked him to wait. They seemed to be checking whether he was allowed out of the country or the police needed to be called when he arrived home.
Last January his permission to travel to the US, known as an ESTA, was withdrawn with no explanation. He did not know that Mr McIntyre’s team had, or was about to approach the US FBI and Department of Homeland Security for information about whether Mr Roberts-Smith planned to relocate to the US.
There were strange moments. While the Federal Government was spending millions on an investigation that could send Mr Roberts-Smith to jail for life, it provided him with free airfares and hotels for the Queen’s funeral in 2022.
Travelling became harder in 2025. On a flight back from a Bali holiday his phone and bags were thoroughly searched. In Thailand and Fiji he was detained at airports for short stretches.
The couple met at Seven’s television station in Brisbane in 2020. He was the general manger. Thirteen years younger, she worked on the marketing team.
After losing the defamation case, Mr Roberts-Smith resigned from Seven and returned to Perth, his home town, with Ms Matulin. As the most famous ex-member of the city’s famous regiment, Mr Roberts-Smith had no anonymity.
After a year-and-a-half they returned to Queensland, where Ms Matulin was raised. She was hired as a marketer for the Brisbane Bullets, a National Basketball League team. He tried to get on with life under government surveillance as a father to twin teenage girls.
The couple talked endlessly about what would happen if he was charged. Mr Roberts-Smith told his lawyers to tell Mr McIntyre he would surrender himself if charged, according to court documents.
“We have never planned to run away from this and have always intended to face the criminal charges if they presented,” Ms Matulin said in a statement to the court last week.
But the couple had come to believe that they had no future in Australia because Mr Roberts-Smith could not get a job, according to Ms Matulin’s statement.
“Ben and I had agreed that neither his life, nor mine, could continue to remain on pause in Australia waiting for the Office of the Special Investigator to charge him,” she said. “Our family and friends encouraged us to continue to live our lives.
“As the years went past, we got more serious about moving overseas. In large part this was because we believed Ben’s children were probably now old enough to be able to fly to and from us during some school holidays so that we didn’t always have to be the ones doing the travelling, and so the girls could travel overseas to different places with us.”
The Office of Special Investigator, staffed by Federal Police, military personnel and government lawyers, wasn’t convinced.
Police officers were tracking Roberts-Smith’s mobile phone, and either listening to his calls or reading his emails, and using a public database to find out who owned the property listed on his his drivers licence.
Last October Mr Roberts-Smith hired a lawyer in Spain and began the process of applying for a resident and work permit. They needed to provide Spanish authorities with background check, which Mr Roberts-Smith was forced to request from the Australian Federal Police, the organisation helping tack his movements and monitoring his communications.
They ended their rental lease and moved into Ms Matulin’s parents’ house, a change that investigators regarded as suspicious. He booked a ticket to Spain for April 11. Ms Matulin decided to leave Brisbane a day later. They thought Mr Roberts-Smith might be detained in Singapore, and she didn’t want to get on the second flight without him, according to the court documents.
Investigators saw a more sinister plot. They thought, according to court documents, the couple were escaping overseas to make it difficult for Mr Roberts-Smith to be arrested. They weren’t sure Spain was their final destination. Maybe it was cover for another country, they thought.
On Tuesday April 7, Mr Roberts-Smith was arrested at Sydney Airport as he arrived for a shopping trip with Ms Matulin and his 15-year-old daughters. Metadata indicated the journalists he sued had been tipped off the day before about his arrest.
The Federal Police denied leaking information.
