On the evening before she was due to meet with police to go over statements about her experience as a slave, a frightened Tamil woman received a call at her nursing home.
“If you listen to the police you‘ll never be able to leave this country, you’ll be here until you perish, until you die,” the caller said, claiming to be a court translator who wanted to help.
The woman, who is now aged in her 70s, was due to give evidence against her slave keeper Kumuthini Kannan.
After the hour-long call, which had been made from a shopping centre pay phone, the victim screamed, cried and struggled to breathe.
She did not recognise the voice on the phone but later realised it was Kannan, the woman who had kept her as a slave for eight years.
Kannan and her husband were on trial in the Supreme Court for keeping the woman in domestic servitude at their home in Melbourne’s east between 2007 and 2015.
The accused woman was desperate to stop her former slave giving evidence against her, but it did not work and she continued assisting police.
She described having tea and curries thrown at her, being beaten with a frozen chicken and prevented from returning to her Tamil Nadu home in southern India.
She worked up to 23 hours a day doing housework, caring for their children and was restricted from going outside or mixing with members of the Tamil community.
In 2021, Kannan and her husband Kandasamy were found guilty by a jury of intentionally possessing a slave and intentionally exercising over a slave any of the powers attaching to the right of ownership.
Kannan, 55, had her eight-year jail term increased by one year in the County Court on July 7, after admitting a fresh charge of attempting to pervert the course of justice by discouraging her victim from giving evidence.
Judge Martine Marich said Kannan’s offending was gratuitous and serious as she exploited her victim, knowing she spoke no English, was illiterate, isolated and had been through a “terrible ordeal” at her hands for years.
“Your threats emphasised her isolation in a foreign country and you tried to engender fear in her that those around were not to be trusted,” Marich said.
Marich increased Kannan’s minimum sentence by six months, meaning she must serve four years and six months before she can apply for parole.
Kannan has already served almost two years of her sentence.
