High-ranking NSW prosecutor Margaret Cunneen SC has spoken out after her High Court win against the ICAC, saying her family has emerged hurt but stronger following the watchdog's ill-fated investigation.
The deputy senior crown prosecutor has also confirmed she will return to public life, having stepped down last year after the Independent Commission Against Corruption's Operation Hale was launched.
"You get a lot of attacks when you make your life as a prosecutor," Ms Cunneen told Macquarie Radio on Friday morning in her first major interview since the decision.
"Some of them have been quite inexplicable but this time they attacked my family.
"For my family to have their most basic human rights in the way that was threatened and in the way it was done was quite intolerable. I knew in my gut from the start that it was really a massive blunder."
The highest court in the land ruled on a 4-1 majority on Wednesday that the allegations raised by the ICAC were not corrupt conduct as defined in the statute.
The watchdog had "no power" to investigate the top silk, the High Court concluded.
Ms Cunneen said she will return to the DPP after her win, but not immediately.
She said of the ICAC's probe and her long-running legal fight to quash it: "It certainly made our family bond stronger, because every single member in the family has had to suffer."
The ICAC had accused the top prosecutor of advising her son Stephen Wyllie's girlfriend, Sophia Tilley, to fake chest pains at a car crash scene in May 2014 to avoid police officers obtaining her blood-alcohol level.
Ms Cunneen has always denied this, and says Ms Tilley was given a blood test soon after the crash, which showed she had no alcohol in her system.
On Friday she spoke of the "devastation" that confronted her when she arrived at the seven-car crash last May.
"It was so frightening I was in tears when I got there," she said.
"I spoke to my son and then I asked for permission to walk up the stairs of the ambulance to ask Sophia if I could contact her parents ... that was the extent of the conversation."
Ms Cunneen said she has strong suspicions about the identity of the person who made the original complaint against her to the ICAC and has hit out at reports that phone taps sparked the probe, describing it as a "nonsense".
An ICAC spokeswoman said the commission doesn't have any comment on the High Court defeat and would respond in due course.
