Tom Silvagni was found guilty of two counts of rape. Photo / NewsWire / David Geraghty
From minutes before deciding to rape a friend of his girlfriend, Tom Silvagni began to weave a series of lies and deceptions in an ill-fated effort to avoid taking accountability.
Described in court this week as “immediate gaslighting” and “cunning deception”, these lies caused his victim to almost doubt her own lived experience.
But a jury of 12 Victorians saw through the mirage after a trial spanning almost two weeks.
Just minutes after midday on December 5, two words rang out in a hushed courtroom at the Victorian County Court.
“Guilty ... guilty,” the jury’s foreman said after each charge was read by Judge Gregory Lyon’s associate.
Silvagni, the 23-year-old youngest son of Carlton Hall of Famer Stephen Silvagni and former TV presenter Jo Silvagni, reacted with shock, clutching his head in his hands and throwing the full weight of his body back into his chair.
Seven days later, the woman he raped spoke powerfully as she addressed him during a pre-sentence hearing on Friday.
“You were my friend, someone I thought I could trust … and today you don’t get to interrupt me, you don’t get to twist my words,” she said.
Rape carries a maximum penalty of 25 years in Victoria.
Addressing the court, Crown prosecutor Jeremy McWilliams said Silvagni’s offending was made more serious by the “cunning deceptions” and “persistent dishonesty” taken to “quite extraordinary lengths” in an effort to avoid accountability.
“To deny her experience of reality demonstrates a real moral culpability and real moral deficit, a real lack of empathy, a real sense of entitlement,” he said.
During the trial, jurors heard the woman was invited to the extravagant Silvagni home in Balwyn North by a friend of hers – Silvagni’s girlfriend.
She arrived shortly after midnight and spent a period of time socialising with Silvagni, his girlfriend and a friend of his, a man with whom she’d had a previous casual sexual relationship.
Later that night, the woman and the other man had consensual sex while staying in a guest bedroom.
But, shortly before 2am, the other man decided he needed to leave.
He gave evidence to the jury that he woke Silvagni up as he needed to move his car outside of the Silvagnis’ gate, before departing in an Uber at 1.57am.
Silvagni’s barrister, David Hallowes SC, argued during the pre-sentence hearing that what came next must have had a “relative degree of spontaneity” because his client clearly thought the other man would be staying the night.
Silvagni opened the door of the guest bedroom, falsely claiming his friend’s Uber had cancelled and he would return upstairs.
About five minutes later the door reopened and a man, clearly Silvagni on the jury’s verdict, quickly entered the darkly-lit room.
At trial, Silvagni strenuously denied it was him that entered the room and maintained he did not rape the woman.
Outside court on Friday, his father said they were considering appeal options.
The woman told the court the man climbed into bed with her and inserted his fingers into her vagina.
She said she reacted with shock, telling him “no”, and wriggling her body away.
Quickly, she said, she began to suspect it was Silvagni and not the second man after recognising his voice.
The jury was told Silvagni maintained he was the other man when directly challenged about it, saying: “Yeah it’s me, why wouldn’t it be?”
He pinned the woman’s hands behind her back and held her body down, and again penetrated her with his fingers.
She gave evidence she got a hand free and reached up where she felt his long hair.
“Tom I know it’s you, you’re the only guy left in the house,” she said.
The jury heard Silvagni quickly left the room, slamming the door behind him.
She left in an Uber about 2.30am, but not before Silvagni stopped her in the hallway, asking what was going on and requesting a hug.
On the ride home she began telling people what happened, including her mother, two friends and Silvagni’s girlfriend.
In the early hours of the morning the following day, Silvagni edited his friend’s Uber receipt to falsely show he left the Silvagni home an hour later than he did.
At trial, Silvagni’s defence conceded this happened but suggested it was done not to avoid responsibility, but out of panic.
“Might it just be a young man panicking when allegations are made about something he didn’t do?” Hallowes questioned in his opening remarks.
Some six hours after the rape, Silvagni began trying to contact his friend. He sent a message saying “you awake?” and placing two unanswered phone calls.
The pair shared two calls between 9.47am and 10.01am, the details of which were unknown.
But in messages a day or two later, Silvagni urged the friend to lie and “just say you came into [the woman’s] room when your Uber cancelled”.
“I don’t know what’s going on but I just want to make sure [her] lies don’t f*** us up,” he said.
The woman reported the incident to police and 13 days after the rape, she called Silvagni, with the conversation secretly recorded by police.
He falsely claimed his friend had told him he’d actually come back into the room and that he was “really drunk” and said the night was “all a bit of a blur”.
Silvagni pressured the woman to move on with her life and forget about it.
Addressing the court on Friday, the woman said the time since she was raped, almost two years ago, had taken an enormous toll on her.
“While you tried to avoid responsibility I had to face the trauma face-on,” she said.
“Every deflection, every excuse made my healing harder.
“You lied directly into the confusion you created … the fear you caused me didn’t come just from the assault, you made me not trust myself.”
The woman said his actions had caused her to second guess every new connection or interaction with people.
She told the court Silvagni tried to rewrite the truth, doctored evidence and asked others to lie for him, but the truth “stood solid”.
“Tom Silvagni, you raped me not once but twice,” she said.
“You know this, I know this, and now so does everyone else.”
Silvagni will be sentenced on Wednesday.
Sign up to Herald Premium Editor’s Picks, delivered straight to your inbox every Friday. Editor-in-Chief Murray Kirkness picks the week’s best features, interviews and investigations. Sign up for Herald Premium here.