Jessica Lake
In the first Book+Author event of 2026, Dr Yves Rees will be talking to legal historian Dr Jessica Lake about gender, defamation and the law.
In 1788, Mary Smith was ruined and banished from “civilised” society when her neighbor accused her of carrying a bastard child. To silence the ruinous rumors and vindicate her name, Smith sued him for defamation. But in court, she faced the onerous burden, entrenched within English law of sexual slander, of proving “special damage.” Smith should have lost her case, but her action set off a remarkable reform movement.
In Special Damage, Jessica Lake offers a comparative legal history of gendered hate speech, verbal abuse, and sexual harassment across 19th-century America, Australia, and England. Drawing upon original archival material, she tracks the creation of the Slander of Women reforms that made it easier for women to sue when called “whores.” Lake reveals, for the first time, the cases brought by women that spurred and benefitted from these reforms. In doing so, she details how debates about women, speech, and reputation circulated through transnational common law networks, connecting countries, colonies, and continents.
The Slander of Women movement furthered legal protections for women, but also created links between ideas of whiteness, femininity, chastity, and civilization. Special Damage tells a compelling story that questions the costs and compromises of legal progress in a patriarchal and unequal “civilised” New World.
Dr Jessica Lake specialises in media law, legal history, and feminist legal theory. She researches the regulation of expression, reputation, and creativity (privacy, defamation, copyright) in the common law world from the early nineteenth century to the present. Her first book, The Face that Launched a Thousand Lawsuits: the American Women Who Forged a Right to Privacy, was published with Yale University Press in 2016. It showed that women first forged a ‘right to privacy’ in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by bringing cases to prevent and prohibit the unauthorised use of their photographic and cinematic images. Her book was shortlisted for the W.K Hancock Prize by the Australian Historical Association and is taught in privacy law courses globally. Her second book, Special Damage: The Slander of Women and the Gendered History of Defamation Law, was published in December 2025 by Stanford University Press. Jessica has published in academic journals, edited books, newspapers, and magazines on topics including the regulation of image abuse (non-consensual and deep fake pornography), the history of privacy law, gender and technology, and defamation law and the #metoo movement. In 2016-2017, Jessica was the Karl Loewenstein Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College, Massachusetts. In 2022, she received a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) from the Australian Research Council for her project titled ‘The Colour of Sexual Slander’. Prior to academia, she worked for several years as a media and intellectual property lawyer.
About Book+Author
Curated and hosted by Dr Yves Rees, the Book+Author series showcases new books from some of Australia’s most exciting historians.
The 2026 series (4 events) is presented at Bard’s Apothecary. This atmospheric downstairs bar is a wonderful CBD venue for intimate literary and cultural events. (We regret that the venue is not wheelchair accessible.) Grab a drink at the bar before or after the event to make the most of your night! The event space will open at 5.30, half an hour before the scheduled conversation.
These events are free for Friends of the HCV, who receive access to a priority booking period. General public are welcome to purchase tickets for remaining places.
Event Report
The first Book+Author event for 2026 was held at Bard’s Apothecary in Crossley St. in the CBD. It was a full house for a fascinating conversation between the series curator, Dr Yves Rees from La Trobe University, and the author, Dr Jessica Lake from the Melbourne Law School, about Jessica’s recently released book, Special Damage – The Slander of Women and the Gendered History of Defamation Law.
The book charts and analyses the history of gendered hate speech, verbal abuse and sexual harassment across 19th-century America, Australia, and England. Jessica spoke about the creation of reforms that made it easier for women to sue when slandered. This was an outstanding example of transnational history, as she moved from the tumultuous New Jersey of the post-American Revolution period, when women had the vote for several decades, through other states in the US and Australia. At the same time, reforms that empowered women to take legal action against slander tended to reinforce notions of ‘civilisation’ which privileged ideas of whiteness, femininity, chastity, and civilization.
