Australian author, academic and child sexual abuse survivor Professor Gemma Carey has died after a battle with illness.
‘Gemma passed away on 17th November 2024 after a long battle with illness. Her family ask for privacy during this difficult time,’ her family confirmed with Daily Mail Australia.
In September 2020, she released her memoir No Matter Our Wreckage about being sexually assaulted.
‘My mother knew I was abused as a child. She had read letters sent from my abuser to me,’ she wrote in the memoir.
‘But she never spoke to me about them, or what they described. And she never intervened to stop the abuse.’
When Prof Carey was seventeen, she took the perpetrator to court without anyone else knowing and had him placed on the child sex offenders register.
‘My mother knew I was abused as a child. She had read letters sent from my abuser to me’ Prof Carey wrote in the book.
‘But she never spoke to me about them, or what they described. And she never intervened to stop the abuse…Now she is dying and the past is rising to the surface like a bruise.’
Prof Carey suffered a serious injury from receiving the AstraZeneca Covid vaccine in May 2021.
She told newsletter Crikey that the jab left her suffering ‘functional stroke’ symptoms.
Her gruelling rehab process has involved relearning how to read, write and talk while on leave from her job.
Campaigning for a fairer vaccine injury compensation scheme saw her targeted by trolls causing her to leave social media platform X and take professional leave from her job as Director of Centre of Social Impact at the University of NSW in Sydney.
‘Due to harassment that has crossed form this platform into all aspects of my professional and personal life, I will be taking a leave of absence,’ she tweeted on September 10.
Her last post of Instagram, dated
