A false accusation of rape ruined Matt’s life — and it can happen so easily
Matt was falsely accused of sexual assault at work, charged with gang rape, then pursued by prosecutors who had video evidence showing he was innocent. A decade on, the nightmare continues.
‘I became a cautionary tale … I was ‘that guy’.”
“Matt” was falsely accused of sexual assault at work, charged with two serious charges of gang rape, then pursued by prosecutors who had video evidence showing he was innocent. “I was looking at a recommended non-parole period of 25 years. It’s like a death sentence,” Matt says.
He’s speaking to Inquirer in the same week that NSW chief prosecutor Sally Dowling celebrated the results of an internal review, claiming there was no “systemic” issue with wrongful prosecutions at the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions.
Systemic or not, each misconceived prosecution destroys a life. Matt’s nightmare started a bit over 10 years ago. More than a decade later, he remains damaged.
“I don’t recognise myself and nor do the people I’m close to,” he tells Inquirer. “This period changed me and my life entirely. It’s kept me from forming meaningful personal and professional relationships and undertaking anything resembling a productive social and professional life. The idea of sexual assault is understandably repulsive to people. A layperson typically can’t comprehend how you could be pursued all the way to a criminal trial if you were entirely innocent.
“To try and explain that to someone unfamiliar sounds desperate and I’ve become almost completely withdrawn to avoid the situation arising.”
Not your textbook #MeToo case
To this day, Matt is angry and resentful about his treatment by the criminal justice system. This was not the more common #MeToo movement kind of case that pits what “she said” against what “he said”. In Matt’s case, no one could quibble about so-called rape myths. Here, unusually, there was video evidence of the entire incident.
A non-publication order was issued by the court in Matt’s trial to protect the complainant, Matt and his fellow accused, “Graham”. So we are using pseudonyms for them.
Matt was a prison officer working at a small minimum-security jail in Cessnock just south of some of the Hunter Valley’s best-known vineyards. The injustices done to Matt and fellow prison officer Graham can’t be told without relaying some of the gruesome facts.
“Jason” was a notoriously unmanageable inmate. An Indigenous man, he had a tragic and violent backstory. He should never have been at the Cessnock jail as it didn’t have the acute crisis management units found at larger jails such as Long Bay and Bathurst. But there was no room for him at either of those jails when he was put on remand and his bail denied.
Matt and Jason were in their 30s when their paths crossed. Jason’s criminal record was long and troubled. He had been in and out of jail; this was his seventh incarceration.
Jason would frequently self-harm in prison. Threatening self-harm is not uncommon in jail. But Jason carried it out. He tried to strangle himself with a pair of trousers. Another time he tried to cut off his finger. He smeared blood and faeces on prison walls. He would tell prison officers, and later the court, he was self-harming to get their attention.
He was coming off ice at the time of his arrest. His reputation for trouble meant that a specialist response unit, normally deployed to deal with riots and other major disturbances, was used to transfer him 52km west from the Newcastle court to Cessnock jail in late 2013.
Within days of arriving, Jason had found a shard of glass from a broken window in the prison yard. He put it inside an empty Equal pack and secreted it up his rectum to hide it from prison officers.
Jason was soon transferred to what’s called a “safe cell” where, crucially, video cameras could capture his every move. Four days before the alleged rape he can be seen on video footage cutting himself and smearing blood all over his arms and legs and on his prison bed.
Matt didn’t work in this part of the jail. But one afternoon, after collecting some paperwork and supplies for new inmates, he was walking along the corridor past the safe cell. Another prison officer, Graham, was standing outside Jason’s safe cell, negotiating with the angry inmate about a cigarette. Matt had no idea at that stage that this expletive-laden screaming match was about more than a smoke.
Matt turned back from where he was headed, to offer support to Graham. When Graham stepped into the cell, Matt followed.
“You don’t go in there on your own. You always back someone up,” Matt tells Inquirer. “God, I wish I hadn’t gone in,” he adds quietly. Throughout the interview, I ask Matt to speak up a little. He’s softly spoken as he talks about the nightmare that still haunts him.
The incident takes place over a period of four minutes, from 2.33pm until 2.37pm.
Jason later would tell the court that he waved the shard of glass at Graham, who was outside the cell, to get his attention. When Matt walked by in the corridor, Graham had been trying to get Jason to hand over the glass in return for a cigarette. But Jason had refused.
When Graham entered the cell with a blue glove on one hand, the video shows Jason secreting the glass wrapped in paper up his backside again. He later would accuse Graham of rape by anally penetrating him with his fingers.
Jason did not claim Matt physically raped him but alleged Matt was guilty of rape – a gang rape or joint criminal enterprise – because he held Jason down while Graham penetrated him.
Video footage showed no such thing. It shows the two prison officers entering the cell and Jason secreting the glass up his backside and dropping to the ground. Matt is seen holding Jason’s head and arm while Graham is holding his legs down. The judge later would find the video footage provided “no support” for Jason’s allegation of rape: “In fact, my viewing … suggests the opposite to that claim … that is, there was no digital anal penetration, although there was certainly a search which involved possible touching of (Jason’s) nether regions by (Graham).”
The judge also would find there was no gang rape or joint criminal enterprise: “The accused assisted (Graham) in what I regard as a very reasonable search of (Jason) for the glass shard.” When police first investigated, they decided there was nothing to the allegation. No rape. Nothing. The “use of force” to protect Jason did not raise any alarm bells. Reports had been written by both officers. More important, there was the video footage.
Kafkaesque charges
Ten months later, Matt and Graham were called into the boss’s office. Dave Mumford, general manager of the Cessnock correctional centre, was about to tell his officers to front up at Maitland police station the next day to be formally charged with sexual assault. The decision to charge was made by a new team of investigators assigned to the NSW Corrective Services department.
The formal words of the charges set out “sexual intercourse without consent … in circumstances of aggravation”, namely that there was a joint criminal enterprise between Matt and Graham to rape Jason.
In layman’s words, the two men were being charged with gang rape akin to criminal charges brought against the infamous Skaf brothers for their heinous gang rapes of Sydney schoolgirls in the 2000s.
Matt was speechless. “It was all just a nightmare,” he recalls. “I was a mess.” Mumford put Matt on restricted duties, working in the control room, as he was too afraid to go back into the prison population. Matt started drinking. Then came the panic attacks.
“My blood pressure had always been perfect,” Matt says. “I was having panic attacks and my blood pressure went through the roof.” His doctor prescribed Valium, later Prozac and Effexor.
Prosecutors had only the word of a manipulative inmate who was seeking compensation for the alleged rape, and testimony from a fellow inmate, a convicted drug felon, who claimed Jason had told him of the rape. Prosecutors offered the drug felon a reduced sentence in return for his testimony. And they had that crucial video.
Matt likens his experience to living through something like the saga of Franz Kafka’s book The Trial. He was being tried for gang rape. He didn’t do it. And there was no evidence. And he still has no idea why they went to court. During this time he was heavily medicated, and self-medicating with alcohol. He was working but barely existing. In disjointed words, he tells me he considered taking his own life. He can barely get the words out.
His mum had to remortgage her new home to fund his legal defence. “She had never owned her own home,” Matt says. “And now she risked losing it. I was worried this whole thing was going to kill her.” Matt’s legal team submitted two no bill applications to prosecutors to have the charges dropped. Prosecutors rejected both.
Mumford was calling Matt just about every day to check on him. Shortly before the trial, Matt’s phone rang at 3am. Graham had died from a massive heart attack lying next to his wife in bed. “God, he was 46,” Matt says. “His wife told me down the track they were going to buy a caravan and do all these things, and the next thing, he gasped, and he was gone.”
Matt spiralled further down a dark hole. A good man who had tried to protect an inmate from self-harm had been driven to his early grave. It meant that prosecutors had lost a crucial defendant. But they still went to trial, effectively prosecuting a dead man for rape to get to Matt, who was charged with a joint criminal enterprise. “It was a really bad time, it just kept going and going,” Matt says. “I was a mess. I was only just existing by that stage.”
The trial
Just weeks earlier the media was awash with stories of prisoner abuse at the Don Dale detention centre in the Northern Territory. Matt risked being convicted, unwittingly, for the sins of others. So, days out from the scheduled trial set down for eight days starting on August 8, 2016, Matt requested a judge-only trial. That was granted and the case was heard by NSW District Court Judge Roy Ellis.
From the start, the prosecution’s case was in tatters. Jason’s evidence over two days in the Newcastle court was inconsistent, unreliable, incredible; his allegations soon came undone. Two other prosecution witnesses offered no credible support to the gang rape allegations.
Acquitted on day three
Under the law at the time of Matt’s case, a judge could, on close of the prosecution case, give a jury what’s known as a “Prasad” direction instructing them that they may return a not-guilty verdict. It was a discretionary power vested in judges and intended to be used sparingly. Ellis did something unusual. He issued a Prasad direction to himself – and acquitted Matt on the third day. The prosecution, at its highest, didn’t meet the guilty beyond reasonable doubt test. Matt didn’t get to mount his defence.
In his judgment on the afternoon of August 10, Ellis described Jason as “an individual who has significant mental health issues (and) a huge challenge to corrections officers. His conduct, as on display in various videos, was very problematic and part of a deliberate campaign by him to get what he wanted from authorities.”
Ellis found Jason to be “unstable”, “unreliable” and “untruthful”. Ellis also found the video of the incident offered “no support for (Jason’s) allegation … in fact, my viewing of the DVD recording suggests the opposite”.
Before the day was over, the judge made a costs order in favour of Matt, ordering the state to pay Matt’s legal bills.
The legal test for a costs order is as follows: if prosecutors knew at the time of launching the prosecution what they know now, would it have been unreasonable to go to trial? Crucially, in his costs judgment, Ellis said the complainant “was always going to be … an unreliable witness”. In other words, prosecutors should have known that Jason’s evidence was weak.
Ellis zeroed in on the video footage again, too.
“We don’t very often have a video of the whole incident,” he said. “In this case there was a video of the incident, and it does not, of itself, support (the complainant).”
Ellis repeated his earlier finding that the video showed there was no rape and offered no support to the prosecution case that Matt knew about the rape and was part of a joint criminal enterprise. In other words, prosecutors had no evidence of a gang rape either.
Matt dissolved after the verdict. His mum, in court, was crying. So was another female friend, there among a group of six or so others supporting him.
‘I never got to tell my story’
I ask Matt why he has contacted me, almost 10 years after being acquitted. “I never got to tell my side of the story,” he says.
He still can’t make sense of why he was charged, prosecuted, tried.
Pressures on the police investigation team? Pressure from the Aboriginal Legal Services, which was acting for Jason? Forces within the Corrective Services department seeking a scalp? Prosecutors determined to get a guilty verdict for an Indigenous inmate making serious accusations of sexual assault in prison?
Why did police and prosecutors trust a troubled inmate’s word over Matt’s? Matt had a spotless record. The judge commended his good character. Why would he leave the area he worked in to go and rape an inmate in front of cameras?
“The complainant had AVOs against him from just about every single woman in his life; his mother, former partner, other acquaintances and even his next-door neighbour,” Matt says.
“He was ultimately barred under threat of arrest from his local medical complex for threatening his treating psychologist. He was clearly a damaged human being but he was no victim; he was a danger to others and I refuse to believe that the justice system could be incompetent rather than malicious in this matter.”
Why didn’t Matt bring a claim of malicious prosecution? “I didn’t have the money,” he says. He was mentally shattered, too, demoralised by the entire saga.
Matt can’t make sense of the damage done either. He says he has been on autopilot since it happened: “The last 10 years have been a blur, since I was charged, after the court, even after the acquittal.”
“It is no exaggeration to say that it ruined my life,” Matt wrote to me last year.
He was chain-smoking, drinking, diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, still on meds; his weight ballooned to 117kg.
When I meet him, Matt is trim, looks healthy, but he is clearly still damaged, mentally and physically, by what happened to him and to people around him.
Mumford, who remains one of Matt’s greatest supporters, would suffer a stroke some six months after the trial.
“(Graham) was acquitted posthumously of his charges in my trial,” Matt says. “This means that from the time that Corrective Services investigations became involved, all the way to the police and the DPP, all that was accomplished was the death of an innocent man, mine and my family’s life and health being destroyed, a convicted drug dealer being released early in exchange for a false testimony and the time and expense of the process being squandered. I simply can’t reconcile how this could be.
“I no longer have any faith in the justice system, from the police to the courts, and I’ve been a uniformed law officer for the better part of 20 years.”
No systemic deficiencies?
Matt contacted me soon after my colleague Ellie Dudley reported on costs cases where NSW judges castigated prosecutors for bringing cases that, they said, should never have seen the inside of a courtroom. Then Matt saw Dowling late in February touting the results of an internal audit that followed Dudley’s expose of judges critical of prosecutors.
The results of the review “should be a reassurance to the public”, Dowling said. It identified “no systemic deficiencies of process”, according to her.
Dowling’s formal review covered 327 cases listed for a hearing in the NSW District Court between April and December 2024. It did not cover the period of Matt’s prosecution.
But Matt’s case was captured smack-bang in the middle of table 1 on page 22 of Dowling’s review. That table captures conviction rates in all criminal matters that went to trial between 2004-05 and 2023-24. It shows that prosecutors secured guilty verdicts in 40-50 per cent of all criminal cases. For sexual assault matters, the percentage of guilty verdicts was even lower – roughly about 30 per cent.
In the same week Matt contacted me, senior barristers did too, concerned that these figures showed that in most cases – and especially in sexual assault cases – prosecutors were proceeding to court and losing.
Many in the legal profession asked the obvious question: why isn’t serious work being done to get to the bottom of the high number of prosecutions that fail?
There are plenty of theories when it comes to sexual assault cases. Victim advocates and even judges defer to so-called rape myths as an explanation for why women aren’t believed. But there is no research to back up these claims.
Others point to the obvious evidentiary difficulties of he said-she said cases where there is no corroborating evidence.
There is another possible cause: prosecutorial misjudgment.
In Matt’s case, neither alleged rape myths nor the absence of corroborating evidence explains his acquittal. Instead, there is the very real prospect of prosecutorial misjudgment.
Buried in those figures are many other people like Matt. People who have been wrongly accused of rape, then charged and prosecuted with serious crimes with little evidence. People whose lives never recover.
Last year ACT Supreme Court judge Lucy McCallum said she wanted to see more research into “why in the 2020s jurors find it so hard to believe allegations of sexual assault”.
There is a veritable juggernaut of “trauma-informed” responses to the criminal justice system for complainants. There is a vast state-sponsored apparatus spanning academia, governments state and federal, bureaus of crime statistics, legal professional bodies, the National Judicial College of Australia, individual judges, all thundering in one direction – to secure more guilty verdicts and to improve the experience of “victims” in rape trials.
Just last week, the Australian Law Reform Commission released it's report with 64 recommendations over 669 pages to improve the experience of complainants in sex cases.
What about people such as Matt? Who really cares about the innocent lives wrecked by prosecutions that should never have been brought? Who is looking after their interests? Their interests are ours too: justice.
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