Deborah Hutton’s former boyfriend sentenced over fake break-in plot

Former model Deborah Hutton’s ex-boyfriend staged a break-in at her home in a “bizarre” plot, a Sydney court has been told.

Former model Deborah Hutton and ex-boyfriend Robert Dulhunty.

The former live-in boyfriend of media personality Deborah Hutton has been sentenced to 300 hours of community service for his “bizarre” plot to convince her she was being stalked by a masked rapist who had tried to break into her home wearing huge pink gloves and meowing like a cat.

Sydney’s Waverley Court yesterday heard Robert Dulhunty, 50, had cut two flyscreens and damaged a wall on Ms Hutton’s Sydney beachside house in the early hours of August 11.

Police said Dulhunty, a former corporate director, had invented the “fanciful story” in a desperate bid to stop her from kicking him out of her home after she had called it quits on their 6½-year relationship.

Ms Hutton had been in Brisbane at the time, but Dulhunty had called her first before ringing triple-0 to report a masked man wearing pink gloves and making “cat noises” was up on a ladder trying to break in to her house in Bronte, in Sydney’s east.

When police arrived, Dulhunty also handed them a backpack he claimed to have found containing an alarming selection of items police described as a ­“sinister rapist kit”.

The items included two sets of ropes, a pair of pliers, a screw driver, zip ties, condoms, lubricant, Vaseline, a soft yellow ball, super glue, a black beanie, four photographs of Ms Hutton’s house and locations she regularly visited, “a single pink glove” and “a jar of plum jam”.

Dulhunty told police he had confronted the would-be masked rapist, who had run off only after he attacked him with a golf club, screaming at him: “F..k off c..t, f..k off now.”

Handing down his sentence, magistrate Michael Barko said it was such a “bizarre” scenario it struck him “inexplicable for a man of his maturity and his worldly experience and sophistication to have committed these offences”.

He said within four days of the crime being reported, police had located CCTV footage of Dulhunty at a nearby convenience store in Coogee, a day before the reported break-in, buying the items for his “rapist kit’.

Dulhunty’s lawyer, Bryan Wrench, said his client had been abusing antidepressant medication at the time and had since been assessed by three medical experts as a narcissistic, depressive man with autistic traits.

He said while Dulhunty’s “disordered thinking” did not “absolve him” for frightening Ms Hutton , “he really didn’t appreciate what was going on”.

The intense media coverage of the case, he said, had resulted in Dulhunty “living with the consequences of his misdeeds every day”. He had been shunned by almost everyone in his life, including a former flatmate who had Googled his name and left immediately.

Handing down his sentence, Mr Barko agreed Dulhunty had no previous history of violent behaviour, but he noted that Dulhunty had been to jail before: in October 2015, the NSW Supreme Court sentenced him to six months in prison for market ­man­ipulation of the company Healthzone.

He said Ms Hutton had acknowledged in a note before the court that Dulhunty now ­appeared “to be a very different person” and there had been “a significant degree of reconciliation” between them, even though the relationship was over.

“It is clear that Mr Dulhunty has apologised to Ms Hutton and she accepted that apology,” Mr Barko said.

He imposed a 12-month good behaviour bond and ordered Dulhunty to serve 300 hours of community service. He also ordered Dulhunty to pay police $13,040 in damages for time wasted investigating his allegations.

In February 2018 — months before the relationship broke down — the notoriously private Ms Hutton described Dulhunty to The Sunday Telegraph’s Stellar magazine as “the yin to my yang”.

Ms Hutton became well known after a high-profile modelling career that began at age 16 when she made the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine.