His dominatrix wife's assault case adds coda to oddities around South Australian forensic chief Colin Manock
Morgan Gabrielle Jaya Cox, shown in her dominatrix role as Mistress Gabrielle, leaving the Adelaide Magistrate’s Court (at left) where she faced a hearing of assault charges during a KInk Adelaide event in 2016. Cox said she'd been targeted for being the wife of former South Australian chief forensic pathologist Colin Manock (bottom right).
The bizarre aspects of the career of South Australia’s unqualified and digraced chief forensic pathologist Colin Manock (1968 to 1995) had an added colourful sequel – in court – in 2018.
Manock’s wife, Morgan Gabrielle Jaya Cox, 46, a dominatrix known as Mistress Gabrielle, appeared in the Adelaide Magistrate’s Court on a charge of assaulting Tracie Latham, known as the Dragon Princess, at the Kink Adelaide event in the city’s Queen's Theatre in 2016. Cox was due to perform at the event that included live demonstrations of rope play, flogging, an equipment sale and a fashion parade.
Latham, the event’s volunteer manager told the court hearing against Cox that she lived in a consensual master-slave relationship with her husband. Latham said she was attacked by Cox after telling her not to take videos of the venue to protect patrons’ anonymity. In a heated argument, Cox told Latham: “You have no right to speak to me. I'm a mistress and you're just a slave.” Latham responded: “Actually, you're right. To my husband I'm a slave but I'm not your slave.”
The argument led to Cox putting Latham in a headlock and hitting her four times in the face with uppercut punches, leaving her with a black eye. Witnesses described the incident as “quite odd” and a “schoolyard slap fight”. In her evidence, Cox conceded that she had called Latham a slave but insisted she was following the “highest protocol” of BDSM (bondage and discipline, domination and submission, sadism and masochism) because they were at a formal event.
Cox claimed she’d been permitted by the event’s organisers to film her performance. She said Latham verbally harassed her throughout the night, followed her through the venue and stepped on her floor-length black cloak. That, she said, caused her to flail out with her arms as she struggled for breath. Magistrate Brett Dixon rejected Cox’s version of events. He said she had no reasonable excuse for her actions and found her guilty.
Cox said she would appeal the conviction because she claimed she was being “targeted because of who (her) husband is". Her husband Colin Manock, as South Australia’s chief forensic pathologist, had been exposed for a series of flaws in evidence in high-profile murder cases such as Henry Keough’s. Cox, who also said she was targeted for being “beautiful, young and a dominatrix”, withdrew her threat of appeal when the magistrate decided not to record a conviction.
