Revealed: The sordid past of Simon Lowe, a Sydney playboy turned rapist

HE WAS a serial lover who once dated movie star Barbara Hershey and told women his name was Portuguese for "beautiful hunter".

Simon Lowe

HE WAS a serial lover who once dated movie star Barbara Hershey and told women his name was Portuguese for "beautiful hunter".

Bonito Monteiro also talked up his credentials as an actor, model and filmmaker working on an environmental documentary that would rival Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.

In his mind he was a superstar waiting to happen.

But the facade crumbled when the courts exposed his true character: a rapist with a penchant for violence against women, whose real name was Simon Lowe.

 Lowe's troubled history was laid bare in the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal where the 44-year-old conman was last month ordered to serve an 11-year prison term after he failed in a bid to overturn the sentence imposed for raping a former lover.

His victim, who cannot be named, was a 37-year-old woman from Sydney's eastern suburbs who Lowe subjected to almost a year of torture.The woman said in documents tendered to the court that Lowe threatened her with iron bars and told her he would "go after my family and ... gut my dad like a fish" if she went to the police.

Eventually she did, but only after Lowe had raped, bashed and twice impregnated her while he was living at her ritzy Bellevue Hill apartment.

Lowe moved in one month after a chance meeting with the woman over a pizza on a drunken late night in 2007.

The woman thought at first that she had "met the man of my dreams".

What she didn't know was that the attacks she would suffer over the next 10 months were part of a pattern.

In 2005, former lover and high-profile real estate agent Jaime Upton took out an apprehended domestic violence order against Lowe after an incident at her home.

A year before, he had been given a 12-month suspended jail sentence for stalking another former girlfriend, a Central Coast model.

In 2003, he beat charges of filming himself having sex with a woman and threatening to distribute the tape unless she agreed to withdraw as a witness in a failed rape case against Melbourne entrepreneur Stephen Millichamp.

Early in their relationship, his 2007 girlfriend had no idea of her partner's past, but the signs began to appear when Lowe became increasingly aggressive, jealous and possessive.He accused her of associating with other men and began to become physically violent with her, court documents said.

According to the documents, when he raped her in the Bellevue Hill apartment he slapped and put his hand over her face, releasing his grip at times to allow her to breathe.

When the ordeal was over, the woman told him she needed to use the toilet and he said: "I don't care, piss the bed", court documents said.

The woman told the court Lowe had pulled out a clump of her hair and had sex with her against her will in September 2007. He was not charged over that alleged incident.

She also said there were other instances of "non-consensual sex".

The woman told the court that on one occasion she said to him: "You raped me." He allegedly replied: "Prove it. Where are the marks?"