After playing around a bit I found that what I could do was add padding to the whole paragraph and make the first line a negative indent.
I am using an api called dynamic reports so the way I did it was
TextColumnBuilder<String> itemBulletsCol = col.column(
"", COLUMN_NAME_BULLET_LIST, type.stringType()
).setStyle(....
.setFirstLineIndent(-10)
.setPadding(10)
);