'Stateless' Preview: True story of Cornelia Rau who was unlawfully detained in Australia after escaping a cult
Most people have known Netflix's upcoming drama 'Stateless' as the Cate Blanchett co-creation with a slew of big names like The Affair's Dominic West, and The Handmaid's Tale's Yvonne Strahovski, among Blanchett herself. But a closer look at the six-part miniseries will reveal that its core plot of Australia's detention policies failing at bureaucratic levels is based on the haunting real-life story of Cornelia Rau, a mentally ill Australian resident who had been locked up in the country's Baxter Detention Centre for 10 months. In the series, Strahovski's Sofie Werner walks the same arc as Cornelia, landing from a sinister self-help cult to a detention center. And while six episodes are not enough to highlight the horrors endured by Cornelia, Blanchett's drama succeeds at summing up what really happened.
When we meet Sofie, she is part of a dance cult GOPA with aims of self-help. She is chided by the charismatic and hypnotizing cult leader Gordon and berated by him publicly for her negativity afflicting everybody around before she is thrown out of the cult. There's an underlying hint of sexual exploitation by Gordon during one of their one-on-one sessions, following which Sofie unravels and lands up in psychiatric care where she keeps running away from. Soon we find her in an Australian unlawful immigrant detention facility where, unlike the other detainees, she is a white woman from a seemingly developed country. But unlike the other detainees seeking asylum through an Australian visa, Sofie wants to go back home to Germany. Sadly, that dream seems a far off prospect and she has to stick around much like Cornelia had to in her ordeal.
Sofie's case is borrowed heavily from Cornelia's reality. Born in Germany, Cornelia accompanied her family -- parents and an older sister -- to Australia and grew up in Sydney. After receiving a diploma in leisure and recreation, she began working as a flight attendant in 1993, and just five short years later her troubles began. It all started with Cornelia joining the controversial sect Kenja in 1998. Just like Sofie's GOPA standing for the cult leading married couple Gordon and Patrick, Kenja was named after its leaders -- World War II veteran Ken Dyers, and his failed actress wife, Jan Hamilton. These two had a magnetic pull over the clients who reportedly had to pay a hefty sum to stay there and in years to come, often complained of being completely shattered in the name of self-help.
Cornelia was no different than other victims who had gone on to sue the cult, after being exploited by them. Forced to reveal their deepest, darkest secrets, members of the sect would be publicly outed by the leaders using these very leverages. According to parliamentarian Stephen Mutch, former members have even claimed that Kenja would force followers to break off all ties with their family, which we see in 'Stateless' as Blanchett's Pat reminds Sofie they 'found' her right before she is about to meet her sister Margot. Five months of prolonged manipulation, insecurity driven quest for validation, and imminent humiliation later, Cornelia finally relapsed. Struggling with mental health, she became a request escapee from mental hospitals, where she was admitted after being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and later schizophrenia.
In March of 2004, Cornelia managed to sneak out of the Manly Hospital where she was admitted in the psychiatric wing. That was the last her family would see her for a really long time as she totally disappeared. Just days later, however, she was apprehended by the Queensland police for driving on the wrong side of the road. After claiming she was coming from Germany crafting intricate fantasies about her way to Australia, and giving them two different false names and a stolen Norwegian passport, her story got more and more complex. She did admit later on that she lied about it through and through to avoid being found by the sect.
Shortly after being apprehended, Cornelia found herself at the Brisbane Women's Correctional Center because Queensland didn't have any detention centers. Assuming she was a lost German citizen, officials didn't even consider the possibility that she was Australian. As her behavior got more erratic, they put her in separate confinement; she would pace out, not wash, and end up hoarding food and other stuff. At this point, she had been months without her schizophrenia medication and only in August, about five months since she ran away, Cornelia was finally diagnosed with a psychotic disorder.
Even after all this, suspicion about her illegally being in in Australia prevailed. Two months after her prison diagnosis, she was moved to the Baxter Immigration Detention Center. Her fellow habitants there were Iranians, Afghans, and Iraqis -- all seasoned veterans at the facility, with their refugee claims denied repeatedly. While experts agreed Cornelia had a personality disorder, they didn't claim she was mentally ill. They chose to keep her without treatment in Red One, a compound where she was allowed outside only four hours a day. It was only in January 2005, a full tenth months later, that The Age published a story about her which her family came across. Cornelia was labeled a mystery woman who might be ill, in that story, and soon her family came to her rescue.
Cornelia went on to receive $2.6 million in compensation for wrongful detainment. While a lot of people claim Cornelia's ordeal was highlighted because she was an anomaly as a white person in an Australian detention center, other residents at Baxter who have waited for years to no avail have also made headlines. In 2004, three Iranian asylum seekers protested by climbing onto the roof of the gym. In the Netflix series, two Tamil refugees at the fictional Barton Detention Center where Sofie lands, do the same. Some of Baxter's detainees joined hunger strikes, some sewed their lips together. Some of them even helped orchestrate protests by refugees activists, leading to the eventual shut down of the facility soon.
'Stateless' premiers on July 8 with six episodes on Netflix.