FIFTEEN years ago, he was the brash ringleader of a gang of sickening serial rapists terrorising young women in the city’s west as Sydney prepared for the 2000 Olympics Games.
But when he got into court, Bilal Skaf looked more like a scared teenager than a sexual predator.
Deputy Senior Crown prosecutor Margaret Cunneen SC, speaking to the Daily Telegraph in an exclusive podcast, recalls the first time she saw him.
“He didn’t look very scary,” she said. “He isn’t a big person and he is young, he was about 19 or 20 when I first saw him.
“He was 18 when he had committed these rapes. He didn’t look very old and he didn’t look very intimidating, in fact he was looking a bit scared.”
As the young women the gang abused and degraded had to summon every ounce of courage to walk into court to face their attackers from the witness box, Skaf and his three co-accused, at that first trial, treated it like a game.
They laughed and joked, tore up polystyrene cups and threw bits around the courtroom and destroyed their microphones.
In the afternoons they fell asleep. All in front of the jury.
“I don’t think they realised how seriously people were taking it,” Ms Cunneen said.
Meanwhile, one of their victims, known as Miss C, who was raped by 14 men over six hours, could be heard agonisingly heartbroken in a witness room where she was comforted by Salvation
Army court chaplain Major Joyce Harmer.
CHAPTER ONE:15 YEARS ON BILAL SKAF REMAINS UNREPENTANT
“You could hear this terrible noise like a wounded animal because in between times (of giving evidence) Miss C was just so very, very distressed,” Ms Cunneen said.
“It was hard for her to keep going back from each session because in the main trial, she had to be cross-examined by four defence counsel.”
Seventeen-year-old Miss C was in the witness box for more than a week.
“Fourteen men sexually assaulted her and there were 25 separate offences identified over that six hours and of course the final ordeal was that they hosed her down and left her dripping wet on an August night in Lidcombe,” Ms Cunneen said.
“So she was just the most impressive woman for this reason, and I’m not saying she was more impressive that the others, but as a witnesses I have rarely seen someone who had to remember so many details, so many descriptions of individuals and so many incidents in the right order in the right place and she did it.”
On the 15th anniversary of the sickening serial rapes, the first of which on August 10, 2000, and the last on August 30, Ms Cunneen hit back for the first time at the criticism she received for being too close to the victims.
“I’m a mother, I’m a woman and that is the way I work and if anyone thinks it’s inappropriate, I regard that as a completely disgraceful and sexist attack,” Ms Cunneen said.
She also spoke of her admiration for the bravery of the young women who stood up to their attackers in court to convict them.
“When I made that comment that was to try and get her out of the way”
Miss C was one of the four teenagers raped and degraded in the attacks at different parks in south western Sydney over 20 days. The others were given the pseudonyms of Miss A, Miss B and Miss D.
Ms Cunneen said juries now no longer tolerate any denigration of rape victims by defence lawyers in the witness box.
“Juries now know that these types of attacks take place,” she said.
“There used to be a very robust scepticism about whether things had really taken place in the way described by victims because women and children were really second class citizens in the legal system and that has changed in the last 15 years.”
Leaving Downing Centre District Court after one round of guilty verdicts, Ms Cunneen told the waiting media: “I commend the quality of the police investigation and the fortitude of the victim.”
The comment earned the ire of the Court of Criminal Appeal who said a prosecutor should not be talking to the media.
Ms Cunneen has revealed she was only trying to divert the media’s attention away from a distressed Miss C.
“When I made that comment that was to try and get her out of the way,” she said.
“So she was smuggled out under a coat while I drew the attention away from her … and the press didn’t notice her. She didn’t want any part of her body to be visible on any news programs.”
Trial by fire
Then Ms Cunneen copped it again from a differently constituted appeals court, headed by Justice Peter McClellan, after she gave the Sir Ninian Stephen lecture to law students in 2005.
She had gone into detail about the rape trials without naming any of the accused and urged students to think about victims and to make sure that when they walked into courtrooms in the future, it did not come down to a war of attrition between defence and prosecution.
The court banned her from prosecuting the retrial, finding she was biased. Miss C could not face court again without her support and one of her alleged rapists was subsequently acquitted.
“I was saying that five years into (Miss C’s) ordeal because she was still having to front up to court every few months and just couldn’t get her life back on track,” Ms Cunneen said.
“I regard that as a sensible call for care for victims which I think is now reiterated in the community now that other people have started to see what victims suffer.”
She said that perhaps even Justice McClellan, who wrote the lead judgment, may now hold a different view.
He had never sat on a sexual assault trial or heard the evidence of a rape victim but as the head of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse, Justice McClellan said he had not appreciated how devastating sexual assault was to a victim.
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