‘Doyled’: What one woman told police about the former lord mayor

Allegations by up to six women against former Melbourne lord mayor Robert Doyle are being assessed by Victoria Police.

Disgraced ex Lord Mayor Robert Doyle, leaves his South Melbourne home. Picture: Nicole Garmston

She felt trapped. The room was dark, the music loud and the man who would be premier had her pinned to his lap, his hand grasping the inside of her thigh.

All the while, Robert Doyle was grinning at her, giggling like a naughty schoolboy.

In allegations to Victoria Police, she describes how the then Liberal Party leader was tipsy, aroused and persistent. When she pushed his hand away, he laughed and put it right back where it was, high on her leg.

She could feel through her clothes that he had an erection. As quickly as she could, she prised herself free. “That hand went from my knee to all the way up. It was right there,’’ she tells The Australian. “That was extremely uncomfortable. He is more than a bit of a sleaze — he knows exactly what he is doing.’’

The woman’s allegations against Mr Doyle, and allegations by up to five other women, are being assessed by members of a Victoria Police Sexual Offences and Child Abuse Investigation Team.

The Australian is not suggesting the allegations are true, only that they have been made, and are being assessed by police.

Mr Doyle has not been questioned by police and did not respond when contacted yesterday. He has previously denied any wrongdoing. The case before police stretches back 40 years to when Mr Doyle, at the start of his professional career, was an English teacher at Geelong College, and spans his time in state politics and 10 years as Melbourne’s lord mayor.

The woman who spoke to The Australian first met Mr Doyle at a political function at Melbourne’s Park Hyatt hotel, in or around 2003. He was the Victorian opposition leader. She had married into an influential family in philanthropic and political circles.

She was at the head table, a 30-something, pretty brunette ­en­circled by older men in suits. Mr Doyle took an immediate interest in her. “When I was first introduced to him, he seemed ­totally harmless,’’ she recalls. “He was really very friendly and charming.’’

He asked about her work. He told her he’d recently divorced. As other guests drifted away from the table, they remained seated, talking. Then she felt Mr Doyle’s hand under the table.

“That chair just got closer and closer and the hand on the knee went to the hand on the thigh.

“I had a skirt on and the skirt was raising up and the hand was getting closer.’’

She didn’t cry out or slap his hand away. As she explains, her only thought was how to extricate herself without making a scene.

“That is what he takes ­advantage of,’’ she says. “He has honed it.’’

The woman told her husband that night. He was aghast but, like her, didn’t want to take it further.

She next ran into Mr Doyle in July the following year, 2004, at a big, festive corporate function. As partygoers were led from a dining area into a darkened dance space, she found herself again cornered by the Victorian opposition leader. It wasn’t until 15 years later that she realised that — in her own words — she had been “Doyled’’.

She started reading what Mr Doyle was said to have done to a City of Melbourne councillor, Tessa Sullivan. Then she read the account of Carla, a woman who ­alleges she was indecently ­assaulted by Mr Doyle at a 2016 dinner.

She was struck by the echo of Carla’s story in her experience.

“Reading Carla’s statement brought it home that this is his modus operandi,’’ she says.

“It was so similar it was ridiculous. I was reading it thinking that could have been me.

“It is bizarrely similar.

“I have daughters. When do we stop brushing it under the carpet (by) accepting it is part of normal behaviour for men? Is that teaching your daughters you are just going to have to deal with it?’’

Carla met Mr Doyle the night she was seated next to him at a dinner sponsored by Melbourne Health.

In her testimony to a City of Melbourne investigation, she detailed how Mr Doyle’s attentions escalated from suggestive remarks to repeatedly grabbing her on the thigh, within a few centimetres of her vagina.

Throughout her ordeal, her fiance was on her other side, oblivious to what was happening. “I felt incredibly uncomfortable,’’ Carla told investigators. “(It was) as though he knew I could not do anything about it as to do so would create a scene and spoil the evening for my fiance. It seemed to me that he was taking advantage of the situation.’’

Mr Doyle’s reckoning arrived in late 2017 when Ms Sullivan and a current councillor, Cathy Oke, accused him of groping and sexually harassing them. He quit as lord mayor and was hospitalised with a mental health condition.

His health has recovered but his public life appears at an end.

The most serious claim by Ms Sullivan, that Mr Doyle grabbed her breast in the back seat of his chauffeured car, was upheld by an investigation led by Ian Freckelton QC.

He also accepted Ms Oke’s account of what happened at a 2014 work dinner when Mr Doyle repeatedly groped her thigh under the table.

A further report by Mr Freckelton into Carla’s allegations was unable to be completed after Mr Doyle refused to respond to his draft findings, citing his ill health. He is now challenging the legality of the Freckelton inquiry in the Victorian Supreme Court.

Against the backdrop of these legal manoeuvres, a criminal case against Mr Doyle has been taking shape. A Victoria Police spokeswoman last week confirmed detectives had spoken to “a number of women in relation to historic sexual assault matters’’ and the case was at a “preliminary stage’’.