Attorney David Bitel died five years ago. The movie that premiered on Bitter Winter is now winning awards.
by Massimo Introvigne
David Bitel, the Australian lawyer accused of sexually abusing male refugees and immigrants who came to him for legal advice, died five years ago, on August 20, 2016, just before his trial. Last month, the movie “Devil in a Lawyers Suit,” directed by attorney Mark Tarrant and young filmmaker Otto Alexander (Otto Khoo), premiered on Bitter Winter’s website.
We are pleased to report that the film met with international success. It was selected for competition at the 2021 Accolade Global Film Competition, California. Previous Accolade winners include well-known documentary movies such as “The Hunger,” a documentary about the Irish Famine narrated by Liam Neeson, and “Phil Liggett: The Voice of Cycling” by Nickolas Bird and Eleanor Sharpe.
“Devil in a Lawyers Suit” was also selected for the 2022 Kiez Berlin Film Festival and received an Honorable Mention there. It was equally selected for the 2022 Berlin Indie Film Festival.
After Bitel died in August 2016, Tarrant contacted the public broadcaster Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) about giving a voice to Bitel’s victims. ABC was not interested. Now, the film tells their stories.
Tarrant reports that Bitel had powerful protections in Australia, and comments that “abuse is built into the fabric of the powerful.” Long before the case became headline news, Tarrant remembers, “Bitel was arrested in Bangladesh in 2004 after a New Zealand lawyer notified the Australian Federal Police (AFP) that Bitel was molesting 12-year-old boys in Dhaka. In March and December 2012 the Australian Federal Police were again notified that Bitel was molesting children in Dhaka. The name of the Australian citizen, formally of Bangladesh, who arranged Bitel’s child sex ‘parties’ in Dhaka was provided to the AFP.” “Despite this, and after Bitel was arrested on 5 December 2012, Chief Magistrate Graeme Henson varied Bitel’s bail conditions to allow him to travel overseas,” Tarrant laments.
The film details how in the end, some victims took the courage to testify, leading to Bitel’s arrest and indictment. But one of the victims, “Imran Khan just told me he faces bullying from the Pakistan community in Australia for speaking about the sexual abuse he endured from Bitel,” Tarrant sadly comments.
Massimo Introvigne (born June 14, 1955 in Rome) is an Italian sociologist of religions. He is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements. Introvigne is the author of some 70 books and more than 100 articles in the field of sociology of religion. He was the main author of the Enciclopedia delle religioni in Italia (Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy). He is a member of the editorial board for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion and of the executive board of University of California Press’ Nova Religio. From January 5 to December 31, 2011, he has served as the “Representative on combating racism, xenophobia and discrimination, with a special focus on discrimination against Christians and members of other religions” of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). From 2012 to 2015 he served as chairperson of the Observatory of Religious Liberty, instituted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to monitor problems of religious liberty on a worldwide scale.
