‘I didn’t stop screaming’: Sandra Sully’s horror gun attack

Veteran newsreader Sandra Sully has opened up about a terrifying assault she endured, coming home from a late news shift.

Veteran Ten newsreader Sandra Sully opens up about a terrifying ordeal she endured back in 1997 in this week’s Stellar and Something To Talk About podcast.

Sully was violently assaulted at gunpoint as she was returning home in the middle of the night after reading the late news.

As she got out of her car a little after midnight in November, 1997 she was attacked by a masked assailant wearing a balaclava, who tried to push her back into the car.

The pair struggled and then he put the gun to her temple and pulled the trigger twice. But, for reasons still unknown, the gun failed to go off.

Sully refused to give up, screaming louder and louder until her attacker fled.

The respected newsreader largely kept the ordeal a secret from the public for 20 years, and returned to work just a few weeks later – with one key change in place.

Sandra Sully now …

… and as a late 90s, late shift newsreader.

“Because I was doing night shifts, I had a security detail for 10 years every night when I got home and that gave me real comfort,” she revealed on the Something to Talk About podcast.

Sully believed it was her loud screams that saved her, as they stopped the assailant in his tracks and made him flee the scene.

“It did save me. I really believe that. It was funny, I had a dream as a young woman most of my life about a really frightening experience and that I would be trying to scream and nothing would come out,” she recalled.

“And at the time I remember screaming and I was shocked that it was coming out, and I knew, I found out within a day or two that the people next door had called the police and because I didn’t stop screaming despite him pistol-whipping me, he ran. That was the only thing that saved me. I was lucky. Because he had a gun, balaclava and handcuffs. So he meant business.”

The attack came during a tumultuous time in her life, coinciding with the end of her first marriage, to journalist and political adviser Mark Ryan.

Sully’s interview is in the latest edition of Stellar, with Guy Sebastian on the cover.

She said the 1997 attack came at a particularly difficult time in her life. Picture: Britta Campion / The Australian

“My marriage broke down not long after, which was life’s s**t sandwich, (but) you’ve just got to work it out. I needed my job because I felt very alone and very vulnerable, and it was the one steady thing in my life that I could rely on, as much as you can rely on being a journalist at a TV network,” she revealed.

Sully previously spoke out about the 1997 attack in a 2017 cover story with Stellar, revealing that it took her a long time to process what had happened and feel comfortable talking about it publicly.

“It was at least 10 years before I was ready to talk about it to anyone other than my family, and probably 15 years before I felt like I could put it behind me,” she said.

“I still don’t like to be surprised. If someone makes a loud noise, I jump. I am always aware in a carpark.”

Find more from Stellar via Instagram @stellarmag or pick up a copy inside The Sunday Telegraph (NSW), Sunday Herald Sun (VIC), The Sunday Mail (QLD) and Sunday Mail (SA)

Originally published as ‘I didn’t stop screaming’: Sandra Sully’s horror gun attack