Record sentence for monstrous father after 14 years of torturing, raping daughter
WARNING, DISTRESSING CONTENT:
A father who brutally raped his daughter for years, holding her head under freezing water and threatening her with a machete, starting when she was five has been sentenced to the longest jail term in Australian history for the crime.
The NSW father, who cannot be identified, continued to abuse the girl until she was 19. The court sentenced him on 73 charges related to years of sexual torture.
Together the maximum sentences for all of the offences add up to 999 years and four months in jail, but he was only given a maximum sentence of 48 years and a minimum of 36.
The mother has been jailed for 16 years for her part in the horrifying abuse.
The 14 years of abuse began in 1997, not long after the family moved to a rural property with a creek and a dilapidated shed.
The father, 59, an elite athlete who had once qualified for the Olympics, first walked into his daughter's room naked in February that year, while his wife was in hospital giving birth.
He forced his young daughter to perform oral sex on him.
Soon after that attack, the man dragged his daughter to the property's creek and held her head under the freezing water.
That would happen several times throughout the years of torment the girl suffered.
Over the years of abuse, the girl's mother was complicit in the assaults and intentionally encouraged the sexual activity, the court heard.
She was also involved in performing a number of indecent sexual acts on their daughter with her husband.
The court heard how on one occasion both parents were sexually assaulting the girl on a bed when she vomited over the side of the bed. She was then forced to eat the vomit by the couple.
The court heard how, three years after the abuse began, she had told her eight-year-old daughter “to make noises for her father” during the rapes to “make [it] better” for both of them.
On a separate occasion, the little girl had asked her if she was “doing it properly”.
Justice Huggett said: "this question reinforced the mother’s understanding as to her daughter’s vulnerability".
The mother had also demonstrated the act of masturbation on herself in front of her three daughters, then aged eight, 11 and 12, in the knowledge that her husband was sexually assaulting the youngest.
The judge said: “the victim was entitled to expect that her mother would protect her yet her mother showed complete disregard for her worth and her value as a person".
Some of the other abuse involved the father wrapping the girl in barbed wire and making her stand on an ants nest.
The girl was regularly sexually abused in the shed, where she was also detained with barbed wire and threatened with a machete.
On several occasions she was left in the shed overnight, wounded and in pain.
The brutal abuse involved the father using about five metal tools to rape his daughter, the court heard.
"The majority were relatively large and were not smooth edged," Judge Huggett said.
Sometimes the girl was bashed with the tools after her father had used them to abuse her.
In court, the father was described as "selfish, depraved and sadistic" and arrogant with an inflated ego.
The abuse continued until 2011 when the young woman, aged 19, made a full statement to police. The man was taken into custody in October 2013.
Judge Huggett described the abuse as "profoundly disturbing".
"It is fortunately rare to see offending of this type," she said, during the day-long sentencing hearing.
The young woman, now 21, watched the sentencing hearing via videolink.
Her victim impact statement read: “I will be forever damaged by the torture and inhumane treatment I suffered".
"[I hope] one day I can have a moment in my life where I do not suffer from the horrific memories of the abuse."
