Feminist scorns attack in new memoir

2026-03-01 - 16:07

A new memoir by a leading criminologist attempts to settle a score with a feminist critic—but the woman named in the book has thrown scorn on his claims. In his book Dream Dealer, Professor Greg Newbold revisits a Canterbury University controversy about a 2016 seminar he presented that dealt with false rape complaints. It created a media storm, partly led by PhD student Kara Kennedy. Newbold writes in his book that he was subjected to “vitriolic” personal attacks and a “campaign” of misinformation designed to damage his reputation as well as derail a study he had published that year with New York-based firm Routledge: “My scholarship had ben impugned and my book internationally pilloried.” It’s a strong, angry seven-page section towards the end of Dream Dealer. It casts Kennedy and the members of Canterbury University club UC FemSoc as radical maniacs determined to make his life hell. FemSoc staged a public forum, Rape and Silencing, in response to his seminar. Newbold attended. “I sat there in silence, completely stunned by the vitriol of the attack,” he writes. He was given two minutes to reply. “I was completely blindsided, and left with the feeling I’d been set up.” The seven-page section is typical of the book’s forthright manner. Newbold is famous as an ex-con—he got banged up for dealing drugs—who became a serious academic. His jail time is the centrepiece of Dream Dealer. It’s a good, powerful read. But the problem with memoir is that there is no right of reply. It sets the record straight—as told by the author. It’s a monologue, no interruptions, a hermetic little world; it shuts out dissent, it only tells half the story or maybe even less than that. I wondered about balance, so I called Kennedy on Friday morning. She was easy to track down; she is a public official, elected to Auckland’s Waitematā Local Board in October. I told her Newbold had written a memoir. “Oh my goodness,” she said. “Did he write about me?” “Yes,” I said. “The context is that he’s talking about a book he wrote for Routledge called Criminal Law and Justice in New Zealand which included a chapter on ‘the rise of the feminist movement and the contribution of feminism to changing attitudes towards rape and subsequent amendments to law.’ He gave a seminar about it in July 2016.” “I know, yeah,” she said. “This was a big part of my life. It just cascaded into a whole thing.” I said, “Your particular entrance in the book is when he writes about the Rape and Silencing forum in October that year. It was in response to his seminar. He writes, ‘It was a half hour presentation in front of around 300 people.’ He names you as ‘Kyra Kennedy, an American PhD student (Philosophy).'” “Well, that’s wrong. My PhD was in English. That just proves my point about his level of detail in scholarship,” she said. “He writes you were in your early 20s.” “I was not. But when you’re old, everyone looks young.” “How old were you in 2016?” “Oh, I was late 20s, I think.” “How old are you now?” “I don’t really want to say.” Key to the controversy was the subject of false rape complaints. Newbold writes that the subject only occupied “a small section” of Criminal Law and Justice in New Zealand. He doesn’t go into it any further than that in Dream Dealer. He takes the wider view, positioning himself as a responsible scholar who acknowledges and appreciates feminist thought. Describing his seminar, he writes, “The whole tenor of the talk was sympathetic and complimentary to the women’s cause.” But Kennedy found his views on false rape complaints to be repugnant. She said, “We’re talking about the harm caused when people say that women are always making it up when they say they’ve been raped. I was thinking about all the students going through his classes that were being told that women make stuff up and you can’t really trust women. It was concerning to me that that’s what the university was promoting for their criminal justice programme. So I tried to do something about it.” I said to her, “He writes of you, ‘She launched into me for being a racist, a sexist and a poor scholar. She said my book was full of contradictions and errors.’ The media got hold of it but the whole thing fizzled out and FemSoc, he writes, ‘backed off’. What do you remember about all of this? What were your, you know, learnings?” She said, “I learned that the university doesn’t actually care about freedom of speech and everything it pertains to.” Kennedy and cohort wanted Newbold to be held to account as an academic. According to Dream Dealer, Canterbury University’s law faculty ordered an inquiry into Newbold’s lectures to check for their “robustness and character”. Newbold challenged it, and the university dropped the inquiry. I asked, “What did you learn about Prof Newbold?” She said, “That he couldn’t defend any of my rational scholarly arguments that I made. It wasn’t a vitriolic attack, it was very clearly presented. He cited Wikipedia in the book and other things that are non-scholarly. So I was pointing out how he presented the information was either incorrect or not backed by scholarly evidence.” I said, “You’re talking about his July seminar. He writes, ‘I gave a carefully prepared hour long seminar, complete with slides and overheads which received animated applause from an audience of about 300. But what I didn’t take particular notice of at the time was a line of women sitting together in the second row, avidly taking notes.’ Were you in that row?” She said, “I never sat in the second row. I was definitely at the back.” “But you were there?” She said, “Yes. It had feminism in the title. And so several of us went. My PhD was on that topic. So I was interested. I didn’t know who he was. And then when we went there, it was just so disappointing, some of the things he was saying. So we wrote a letter and signed it and then sent it to the university saying we’re disappointed at the content and how it was presented and everything. And then the university said, ‘We’ll give you a chance to respond by giving you the same public forum.’ So that’s how we ended up doing that panel [in October that year]. “It was very well attended,” she continued. “He [Newbold] came and sat there, but was not happy, obviously, to be criticised in public for his scholarship. But it wasn’t a personal attack or anything like that. I was just saying, ‘You can’t cite Wikipedia in a scholarly book for Routledge.’ And he just took it very badly and is obviously upset about it still.” I asked, “Did you contribute to a series of online posts about him on the FemSoc site?” She said, “We had a Facebook group, like many student clubs. And what I think happened is some people that were fans of his joined the group and then started spying on the group and taking screenshots and sending them to him. And so there was some trolling going on. So we ended up having to close the group because we just couldn’t have a space to really talk about stuff anymore.” I asked Kennedy about her attempts to persuade Canterbury University to conduct some kind of investigation into Newbold. She said, “I took it all the way up to Rod Carr, who was top dog at the university at that time.” “The VC,” I said. “Yeah. I said to him, ‘This is poor scholarship, and just really unacceptable. Can you do something about it?’ And he was like, ‘No.’ So that was the end of the line for me because I spent a lot of time and energy putting all that together and trying to do something about it. And also I couldn’t get anything done about the book [Criminal Law and Justice in New Zealand]. It was still being used as a textbook. It was just very disappointing.” I said, “He writes, ‘The FemSoc campaign lasted over two years.’ Was it a campaign, would you say?” She said, “I don’t know how you define campaign, but no. I mean, seeking resolution to doing something about poor scholarship—I wouldn’t call it a campaign.” I said, “He talks about how Routledge got hold of him and said that they were receiving emails that the book was offensive to women. He also talks about ‘scathing and anonymous’ reviews of the book, which appeared on platforms such as Goodreads. Were you the author of any of these?” There was a pause, and then she said, “I won’t say. But I did contact Routledge and I told them, ‘Did you know that this is citing Wikipedia? Did this go through peer review?’ And they were quite concerned. But I don’t know where they took it from there.” In his memoir, Newbold writes of Criminal Law and Justice in New Zealand, “The damage had been done...Despite its value as the first and only social-historical record of the evolution of crime and criminal justice ever written in this country, it sold only about a thousand copies and there aren’t even enough copies in this nation’s libraries to earn me a royalty from the New Zealand Authors Fund.” The interview with Kennedy lasted about half an hour. I was winding it down with pleasantries when I asked, “What was your PhD in, by the way?” She said, “I studied Frank Herbert’s Dune series. I’m the world’s foremost scholar on Frank Herbert.” “Get out of here,” I said. We both laughed. She said, “Yeah, I’m the Dune scholar. You can look me up on dunescholar.com. I actually have an article about it coming out today on the American Philosophical Association website. And then I’m writing a chapter for a book this year. There’s no money in it, so I’ve had to pull back. I wrote two scathing reviews of the new Dune movie as well, which went viral.” I asked, “What’s your fascination and approach with Dune? Is it philosophical? Is it literary criticism?” She replied, “So the Bene Gesserit, which is the all-female society in Dune, are like the original Jedi, in that they have complete control of their mind and body, which is really unique for women characters in science fiction. My PhD was about reclaiming Herbert as a feminist author. I mean that book came out in 1965 and feminist science fiction didn’t come out till Ursula Le Guin, in ’69 and the 70s. And he’s never gotten any credit. No one has actually analysed the Bene Gesserit, so there was a gap in the scholarship. And so I wanted to talk about how amazing this is that they can control reproduction, they can fight without needing weapons, they can change poison in their bodies. All these really cool skills gives them quite a bit of agency. And it just had never been written about and studied before. So I thought, well, this is a gap. So I’ve published three books on that and numerous journal articles.” I said, “How interesting. Newbold’s book has a bit where someone in FemSoc admiringly refers to you as the ‘original Jedi feminist warrior.'” “Yeah, that’s based on what I was studying at the time,” she said. “And then George Lucas turned them [the Jedi] into men [in Star Wars] and he did a lot of damage. Because people think of the Jedi and they think male, but actually they were women and pretty much stolen from Herbert.” We returned to Earth when I concluded the interview by asking if she had any general closing comments on being featured in the new memoir by Greg Newbold. She said, “Well, I don’t like continuing to be associated with him, but I guess possibly it could mean people will Google me and then they can find those articles at the time and maybe have some doubts about the kind of scholarship coming out around criminology. The problem is that criminal justice in New Zealand is such a small field. There’s only like, you know, him and Jarrod Gilbert and a couple other people, so it’s hard to have a range of views. So it would be nice if people would maybe start questioning what they read. Just because someone’s a professor doesn’t mean that they can be trusted or that they do good research, unfortunately.” My final question was, “Are you gonna have a read of Dream Dealer?” “I mean, I’m not gonna buy it,” she answered, “but maybe if it’s in the library, I would look at it.” Dream Dealer: From prisoner to professor – the extraordinary life of New Zealand’s leading criminologist by Greg Newbold (Allen & Unwin, $37.99) is available in bookstores nationwide.