My Sister’s Secrets podcast: the big love driving Virginia Tapscott

Journalist Virginia Tapscott is on a quest to get justice for her sister Alexandra in The Australian’s latest hit podcast — and her husband Rhys is beside her every step of the way.

Rhys Tapscott, pictured with his journalist wife Virginia, speaks in a new episode of podcast My Sister’s Secrets about the immense toll abuse has taken on their family. Picture: Rohan Thomson

In small country towns, rumours and innuendo can spread faster than wildfire but Rhys Tapscott was still shocked to discover that rumours about his wife’s childhood had circulated in the town for decades.

The former electrician turned livestock manager started dating Virginia Tapp about 10 years ago.

From the outset, Mr Tapscott says he knew there was something special about Virginia and that she was a woman with whom he wanted to spend the rest of his life.

But there was something she needed him to know about her before things got too advanced.

As their romance grew more serious, Virginia decided it was time to have a frank conversation with her partner about her troubled past.

“I think her words were, she had been molested as a child,” he tells My Sister’s Secrets, the new investigative podcast by The Australian delving into the abuse Virginia and her sister Alex endured as children and the tragic impact it had on Alex’s short life and contentious death.

“Since I met Virginia, you know, she’s always been very open about her mental health. When we were first dating she told me she was on medication for anxiety. Everything was out in the open.

“But this really shocked me. I was shocked and I didn’t I didn’t know what to say. She just said it had happened and that was it. But it didn’t change anything for me. It didn’t change the way I felt about her at all.”

Instead, what troubled him most was that her step-grandfather, Bruce Tout, had gotten away with the abuse even after it was uncovered.

“It’s probably the hardest part of it. I guess anger quite isn’t enough to explain it. I was pretty furious. I still am,” Mr Tapscott says.

“I don’t understand how someone can do that to a child, it physically makes me feel sick in the guts thinking about it.”

“All I can do is try and support and help her any way I can,” says Rhys Tapscott of his wife Virginia’s crusade for justice. Picture: Rohan Thomson

Rationally, as hard as it was to contend with, Mr Tapscott understood the family had made the difficult decision to keep the abuse under wraps in the hope it would protect the girls from unwanted attention and the unjust stigma offer attached to sex assault survivors.

Only in recent years he learned that people in the close-knit community still speculated about the abuse to which his wife had been subjected.

“I was approached by a family friend and asked, ‘Did anything happen to the girls, you know?’,” he says.

“I was very upset. The fact that lots of people knew (what had happened to her) and no one did anything (to get justice for her).”

For now, Mr Tapscott says all he can do is be there for his wife as she investigates her sibling’s death for Mr Sister’s Secrets and be ready to help her through no matter what she uncovers.

“I still struggle talking about it because it’s upsetting. All I can do is try and support and help her any way I can.”

–

My Sister’s Secrets is the new investigative podcast from The Australian. Episode 4 is live now in the podcasts section of our app or at mysisterssecrets.com.au

Get the app at the App Store or Google Play

Subscribers hear episodes first and get access to all Virginia Tapscott and Steve Jackson’s groundbreaking journalism on this topic, plus much more. To check out our subscription packages, visit theaustralian.com.au/subscribe