Carlton great Stephen Silvagni has vowed to “stand firmly behind” his convicted rapist son after a court was told he’d be jailed next week.
Tom Silvagni, 23, was found guilty of two counts of rape on December 6 following a two-week jury trial in Victoria’s County Court.
During the trial, the jury was told Silvagni digitally raped the woman twice in January last year, while pretending to be someone else the woman was involved with.
In the days that followed, he urged the woman to not take the matter any further and created a false Uber receipt to cast doubt on her memories.
Leaving court alongside his wife Jo Silvagni, a former TV personality, Stephen Silvagni vowed to “clear his son’s name” before cutting off mid-sentence with an emotional reaction.
“Jo and I, together with our family members and friends, are so disappointed with the outcome,” he said.
“We all love and support our son Tom. Our son continues to maintain his innocence and we stand firmly behind him.
“We will be considering our options to appeal and shall not be making any further comments on this case. Our goal is to clear his name and bring him home and ask for our privacy.
“We’re very grateful for our support…”
Silvagni’s rape case had been shrouded in secrecy by a series of suppression orders since he was charged in June last year — the final order being revoked on Thursday which now allows Silvagni to be identified.
He returned to court via a video link on Friday morning, seated alone wearing prison greens from a room at the Melbourne Assessment Prison.
There were close to 50 people present in the public gallery, but Silvagni’s parents, Stephen and Jo Silvagni, did not enter the court until after the woman he raped had delivered a moving statement.
Her voice breaking at first but growing in confidence over her 30 minute address, the woman begun by saying: “Tom Silvagni, you raped me not once but twice”.
“You know this, I know this and now so does everyone else,” she said.
“You are very much aware of what you did to me that night … It was not a mistake, it was premeditated.”
The woman told the court Silvagni was a friend and someone she thought she could trust, with the betrayal and his efforts to avoid being held responsible damaging her “ability to recognise who is safe”.
Silvagni sat blinking and showing little emotion as she spoke.
The woman told the court for the past two years she felt like she was “constantly hiding behind a mask because I don’t want to be a burden”.
“Every single day I grieve the person I was before you,” she said.
“So many times I just pray, wish and hope that life would go back to the way it was before you raped me.”
She said she was forced to live with feelings of guilt for potentially destroying his life and the lives of his family, due only to his actions on that night.
“You didn’t just take my sense of safety, you took months of my life through gaslighting,” she said.
“Every deflection, every excuse made my healing harder … the fear you caused me didn’t come just from the assault, you made me not trust myself.”
She told the court she’d lost friends due to the impact and had spent the past two years feeling like her life was on hold and seeking professional help for the trauma.
She said she’d had to put herself out in an effort to make new friends, but there is always a “voice in the back of my head reminding me how lovely, sweet and respectful you were to me before you decided to rape me”.
“It’s actually terrifying that someone you thought and knew could do something so terrible,” the woman said.
She told the court giving evidence during the trial forced her to relive the rapes.
“I wish you could experience how hard it was to be questioned by big scary lawyers suggesting I was mistaken and my brain was playing tricks on me,” the woman said.
“You tried to rewrite the truth, you doctored evidence, you asked people to lie for you … after all of that the truth stood solid.”
Silvagni’s barrister, David Hallowes SC, started his adress by conceeding the charges of rape his client was found guilty of were “a serious crime”.
But he argued the sentence imposed needed to take into account Silvagni’s youth, prior good character, and “excellent prospects for rehabilitation”.
The court was told 13 people had written character references for Silvagni, describing their interactions with him in favourable terms.
Mr Hallowes tendered medical reports from two psychiatrists about Silvagni’s mental health issues, including depression and anxiety, which the writers of those reports believed would make his time in custody more difficult.
He urged Judge Gregory Lyon to impose a sentence that would give Silvagni “some light that he can see where he will get out of the tunnel and make something useful of his life”.
In response, Crown prosecutor Jeremy McWilliams said Silvagni’s crimes demonstrated “a real sense of entitlement”.
He told the court Silvagni had used “cunning deception” to take advantage of the woman in a vulnerable place — a friend’s house late at night where she was entitled to feel safe.
Mr McWilliams said almost immediately after the rapes, Silvagni began gaslighting the woman, in an attempt to create an “environment of doubt”.
This included pretending to be the other man, acting shocked when the woman accused him, creating a fake Uber receipt to falsely show the other man left later than he did, and urging the woman not to take it any further.
“To deny her experience of reality demonstrates a real moral capability and real moral deficit, a real lack of empathy, a real sense of entitlement,” he said.
Silvagni will be sentenced on Wednesday next week.
