The woman awarded $93,000 after an illegal strip-search by NSW police thought until “just before” the trial that she would be called a liar in the proceedings by the officers who conducted the search.
This was despite the officers submitting statements 12 months before her appearance that they had no recollection of the woman or the search, a court was told on Friday.
Lawyers acting for the woman, Raya Meredith, and 6,000 music festivalgoers appeared before the NSW court of appeal on Friday in the final day of a two-day hearing where NSW is seeking leave to appeal after losing a class action over unlawful strip-searches conducted at music festivals between 2018 and 2022.
The state made an application for leave to appeal against the successful class action brought by Slater and Gordon lawyers and the Redfern Legal Centre on six grounds, including that the justice Dina Yehia erred in awarding Meredith aggravated damages in September as part of her findings for the state’s conduct in the case.
The state admitted in May 2025 to unlawfully strip-searching Meredith. It withdrew its 22 witnesses, one of whom was the police officer who conducted the strip-search, days before the hearing, reducing it from a scheduled 20 days to just five.
Meredith was the only witness to appear in the class action. She was postpartum and 27 years old when, in 2018, she was strip-searched on her way into Splendour in the Grass in Byron Bay. A female police officer asked her to take all her clothes off, bend over and bare her bottom, drop her breasts and remove her tampon. At one point, a male officer walked in unannounced. The search found no drugs, and nothing else illegal.
On Friday, Justice Gleeson SC told the court that the judge was right to award aggravated damages because Meredith “quite reasonably thought up until just before the hearing she was going to come and have these officers say she’s a liar”.
Meredith was awarded $93,000 in total, including $20,000 in aggravated damages over police conduct in the case.
Gleeson said the state should have amended its defence earlier given the officers involved served a statement 12 months prior to the hearing saying they had no recollection of the event.
“[It] would have mitigated the plaintiffs suffering and hurt,” he said.
Much of the case focused on the NSW legislation that controls police actions in conducting strip-searches, the Law Enforcement Powers and Responsibilities Act (Lepra), with the state ultimately focusing its defence against the class action on the general practice of police officers.
On Thursday, the state’s lawyer Perry Herzfeld SC argued that the state’s conduct did not meet the threshold for aggravated damages, and that a defence being abandoned or failing is not sufficient.
He also argued that aggravated damages can’t be awarded for conduct in a case due to the test often resting “on nothing other than the judge’s idiosyncratic view as to whether the defence should not have been run in the way that it was.”
The state as part of its leave to appeal is disputing the state’s award of $40,000 in compensatory damages for both false imprisonment and assault, claiming the injuries caused by each tort were double counted.
It has also argued the Yehia erred when ruling that police can only request a person move their body parts during a strip-search and does not have the express power to use reasonable force someone if that request is refused.
The Lepra insists they can only be performed when “the seriousness and urgency of the circumstances make the strip-search necessary”. The legislation also mandates that people cannot be interrogated while being strip-searched, and that searches “must not involve a search of a person’s body cavities or an examination of the body by touch”.
Herzfield told the court that section 230 of Lepra, when read with the strip-search provisions, permitted police to use force as reasonably necessary. He said this can only be done to aid a visual search and not to conduct a search via touch.
However submissions made in court documents by the class lawyers argued: “the primary judge did not ignore 230”, which permits use of force, “rather she considered as a general power it was not apt to override the prohibition of examining the body by touch”.
They wrote that the force can be used to aid a visual search so long as the search itself was not carried out by touch was “vague semantic exercise”.
The hearing before Chief Justice Andrew Bell, president Julie Ward and justices Anthony Payne, Anna Mitchelmore and Stern continues.
