Professor Gemma Carey dies: family speaks out after her death
Australian mother, author, academic and child abuse survivor Professor Gemma Carey has died after a battle with illness.
‘Gemma passed away on November 17, 2024 after a long battle with illness. Her family requests privacy at this difficult time,” her family confirmed to Daily Mail Australia.
She and husband Ben O’Mara have a two-year-old son, Gideon.
In September 2020, she released her memoir No Matter Our Wreckage, about sexual abuse.
‘My mother knew as a child that I was being abused. She had read letters my abuser had sent to me,” she wrote in the memoir.
“But she never talked to me about it, 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’s knowledge and had him placed on the child sex offenders register.
‘My mother knew as a child that I was being abused. She had read letters sent to me by my abuser,” Prof. Carey wrote in the book.
“But she never talked to me about it, or what they described. And she never intervened to stop the abuse… Now she is dying and the past is coming to the surface like a bruise.”
Australian professor Gemma Carey, a passionate advocate for the rights of people with disabilities, has died after a battle with illness
Prof Carey suffered serious injuries when he received the AstraZeneca Covid vaccine May 2021.
She told newsletter Crikey that the jab left her suffering from ‘functional stroke’ symptoms.
Her grueling rehabilitation process involved having to relearn how to read, write and speak while on leave.
While campaigning for a fairer vaccine injury compensation program, she became the target of trolls, leading her to leave social media platform X and take a professional leave of absence from her job as director of the Center of Social Impact at the University of NSW in Sydney.
“Due to the harassment that has permeated all aspects of my professional and personal life through this platform, I am taking a leave of absence,” she tweeted on September 10.
Prof. Carey’s last post on Instagram, dated August 25, contained a heartbreaking cry of despair.
Her last Instagram post, dated August 25, was a poetic cry of heartbreaking despair.
