Jacqueline Pascarl

In 2009, Pascarl became a regular columnist for the Sunday Times Magazine in the UK and writes for ThePunch.com.au. She also produces documentary and television films through Creswick Creative. 2011 saw her appointment as ambassador to the 14th Dalai Lama in Australia, and her being awarded the Queensland Disaster Hero Medal 2011 for her work through Operation Angel during the 2010–11 Queensland floods for which she raised and distributed over $5 million worth of material aid to Queenslanders in need. That same year she was awarded the Humanitarian Overseas Service Medal.

She has written two memoirs, Once I was a Princess and Since I Was a Princess (2007). She lectures internationally and advises the European Union and the US State Department and represents Australia at world forums on child abduction issues. She is a consultant to the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and has recently been appointed as a Patron of CARE International in the United Kingdom.

Despite the fact the Prince had softened his stance in recent years and stated that his children could see their mother sometime after they turned eighteen, Pascarl did not see her children again until 2006 when her twenty-year-old daughter Shahirah (now known simply as Shah) visited her in Melbourne. In August 2006, her son Iddin, now 23, returned to Australia to visit his mother after fourteen years of separation.." Upon the return of his wife's abducted daughter Shah in 2006, her husband Bill was the spokesperson for his wife to the media pack that had formed outside of their house. Jacqueline is now in contact with her children most days.

Pascarl established Operation Book Power in 1995, a child literacy project in Kenya and South Africa. In 1998, she was appointed Special Ambassador for the international development and aid agency, CARE International and worked as an emergency aid worker in the conflict zones of Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor. She was based in Europe, leaving Australia after citing privacy issues. She has garnered several humanitarian awards including commendations for child protection from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (USA) and the United Nations. She founded Operation Angel, founded with the aim of restoring dignity to women and children in war torn countries but now involved in disaster relief on a broader basis, recently the destructive Black Saturday bushfires. The group has recently organised to assist Queenslanders in January 2011 in flood relief.

In 1992, Raja Bahrin came to Melbourne for a pre-arranged custody visit, after which he failed to return the children. After some days of uncertainty of his and the children's whereabouts, Raja Bahrin surfaced with them back in Malaysia. He appeared in an interview on television, but refused to say how he had managed to smuggle them out of the Australia, saying only it was the "will of Allah".

The couple divorced in 1986. Bahrin signed over custody of their two children, an arrangement which was later ratified by the Family Court of Australia. In 1990, she married TV journalist Iain Gillespie. They legally separated in the mid 1990s and formally divorced in 2000. Pascarl married former school friend Bill Crocaris in 2002. She and Crocaris have two children.

She was a young ballet dancer in 1980 when she met a Malaysian prince Datuk Raja Kamarul Bahrin Shah Raja Ahmad who was in Melbourne studying architecture. They married in 1981, when she was 17, and moved to Terengganu the following year, where Raja Bahrin was a junior member of the that Sultanate. They had a daughter, Shahirah (Shah), and a son, Mohammed Baharuddin (Iddin). Raja Bahrin later took a second wife under Islamic marital law. By this time, Jacqueline claims the marriage had turned violent. She returned to Australia in 1985 with their children to visit her sick grandmother, and never returned.

Jacqueline Pascarl (born 5 July 1963), formerly known as Jacqueline Gillespie and Jacqueline Pascarl-Gillespie, is an Australian author, TV personality and parents' rights advocate and humanitarian aid worker. Pascarl came to public attention in 1992, when her children were covertly removed from Australia, illegally under Australian law, by their Malaysian father. One man was convicted, sentenced and then jailed as an accomplice. The Parliament of Australia characterised this removal as an "abduction."