A convicted rapist from a high-profile Victorian family will remain unnamed for more than three months. Photo / Diego Fedele, NewsWire
The identity of a convicted rapist from a high-profile Victorian family will remain secret for several more months despite a jury finding him guilty of twice assaulting a young woman.
In an unusual case, the man, who was remanded in custody after the Australian jury delivered its verdict on Friday, cannot legally be named for more than three months.
After the jury foreperson delivered the “guilty” verdicts, the man reacted with shock, was seen clutching his face in his hands and throwing his head back, while family members began sobbing.
After the verdict, he sat hunched forward, clutching his face in his hands, slowly shaking his head.
Before the convicted rapist was led away, Judge Gregory Lyon cleared the courtroom to give him a private space to say goodbye to his family.
The man, who cannot legally be named, faced trial over two weeks in the County Court after denying he was the person responsible.
Instead, through his barrister David Hallowes, SC, he argued the woman was mistaken when she identified him as the perpetrator.
Hallowes asked the court to adjourn the case until sometime in the new year for a pre-sentence hearing.
But Judge Lyon questioned “why can’t we just get on with it?” and hold the hearing next week, noting the defence had the material they would rely on.
The man’s lawyers were given five minutes to discuss options, returning to court to request bail be extended for the “young man who has mental health issues”.
During the downtime, the man’s family approached him in the dock, where they exchanged hushed words.
After the break, Judge Lyon returned to say that, given a term of imprisonment is inevitable, nothing the man’s lawyers had raised convinced him to depart from ordinary practice.
He remanded the man to return to court next week for a pre-sentence hearing.
Summing up the Crown’s case, Crown prosecutor Jeremy McWilliams said the woman had been “consistent, cogent and compelling” about what happened in the almost two years since she was raped.
“She’s not mistaken, she’s not confused, she’s told you what happened; she was raped by [the man],” he said.
In her evidence, the woman told the jury she was invited to the man’s home in January last year by his girlfriend, a close friend of hers, arriving by Uber at 12.23am.
McWilliams said the man had hosted friends that afternoon, playing beer pong and drinking, but, by the early hours, there were just four people remaining.
These were the man from the high-profile family, his girlfriend, the victim and a friend of the accused – with whom she’d previously had a casual sexual relationship.
Later that night the woman had consensual sex with the man’s friend in a guest bedroom, before he left the home in an Uber at 1.58am.
The woman recounted that, a short time after the man left, the man opened the bedroom door, telling her the second man’s Uber had cancelled and he would be coming back upstairs.
Minutes later she said the door opened and closed quickly and a man climbed into bed. She said he inserted his fingers into her vagina, leading her to say stop and wriggle away.
The woman said she became suspicious it was the man and not his friend and challenged him, with the man maintaining he was the friend.
“Yeah, it’s me, why wouldn’t it be?” the jury heard he said words to the effect of.
She told the court he penetrated her again with his fingers but then quickly fled the room after she challenged him again.
“[Man’s name] I know it’s you,” she said.
The woman said she recognised his voice, the feel of his hair and his silhouette as he left the room.
She left in an Uber at 2.31am and immediately began telling people what had happened.
In the days that followed, McWilliams told the jury the man told a “convoluted, complex series of lies” in an effort to avoid being implicated.
These included doctoring an Uber receipt to show the second man left later that night and asking his friend to tell others he’d left “later than I actually did”.
McWilliams said the woman called the man and they had a phone conversation, secretly recorded by police, days after the digital rapes.
In the recording, played to the jury, the prosecutor said the man falsely told her his friend had confirmed it was him and persistently urged the woman to move on and not make it into a bigger thing.
In response, the man’s defence team argued that while he now admitted to the decision to doctor the Uber receipt and telling several lies, it did not show his guilt.
Instead, they asked the jury to consider how an innocent man, confronted with this accusation, might make stupid or idiotic decisions.
Taking to the witness box himself, the man strenuously denied entering the woman’s room or raping her.
Hallowes suggested the woman might have gotten the identity of the man who sexually assaulted her or her timeline of events on the night “terribly wrong”.
He told the jury the woman, in the days after the incident, held at least some uncertainty as to whether it was the man or his friend.
The barrister had argued there was a “real indicator” in the evidence that the second man had left the bedroom more than the one time he said he did to leave the home.
“Whoever went into that room, something clearly went wrong,” he said.
Neither Hallowes, nor the man’s family, provided a comment on the verdict as they left court.
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