James Ricketson: the ‘spy’ who loved Cambodia, and paid for it
How a bumbling filmmaker got six years for espionage
Throughout his 15-month incarceration and three-week espionage trial, Australian filmmaker James Ricketson has lived under appalling conditions, locked up in Cambodia’s notorious Prey Sar prison.
That stay was extended when after a bench of three judges found him guilty of spying for “foreign states” and sentenced him to six years behind bars.
It was the latest saga in an extraordinary era in Cambodian politics that culminated in Hun Sen winning all 125 seats in the National Assembly at July elections, which were bereft of opposition and was widely discredited.
As espionage trials go Ricketson’s case was a scriptwriter’s dream; government intervention of the highest order and he enjoyed popular support at home in Australia with a petition garnering 70,000 signatures demanding his immediate release.
Hollywood arrived with acclaimed director Peter Weir testifying on his behalf, there was even a sex scandal – albeit an erroneous one – with Ricketson, a six-foot three-inch bear of a man, attempting to save impoverished families from life in Phnom Penh’s rubbish dumps.
But the reality was far different. James Ricketson is not James Bond.
