{"id":513233,"date":"2026-03-02T05:13:13","date_gmt":"2026-03-02T05:13:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/513233\/"},"modified":"2026-03-02T05:13:13","modified_gmt":"2026-03-02T05:13:13","slug":"canberra-man-accused-of-sexually-assaulting-woman-he-held-captive-found-guilty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/513233\/","title":{"rendered":"Canberra man accused of sexually assaulting woman he held captive found guilty"},"content":{"rendered":"

Warning: This story contains details that may be distressing to some readers.<\/p>\n

Sexual assault\u00a0support lines:<\/p>\n

An ACT Supreme Court jury has taken less than a day to find a Canberra man guilty of confining and brutally assaulting a woman, who was later rescued by police as she ran along a road screaming and naked.<\/p>\n

Sisituutuumata Fulivai, 46, looked down frowning as the jury delivered guilty verdicts for 20 charges including forcible confinement, rape and assault.<\/p>\n

Fulivai was also found guilty of choking the woman and threatening to kill her and members of her family.<\/p>\n

She had suffered more than 50 separate injuries.<\/p>\n

Victim held captive for days<\/p>\n

The victim said she had managed to escape as she was being assaulted near the front door<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Police patrolling nearby found her as she fled the man’s Lyneham house in June 2024.<\/p>\n

She told police she had been held captive for two days while Fulivai raped and repeatedly assaulted her, before she was able to fight her way out of his home.<\/p>\n

The jury was told the woman had met Fulivai, known as “Islander Matty”, a few days earlier when she and her friends went over to his house, where they had drinks and used drugs.<\/p>\n

The woman stayed the night and they had consensual sex.<\/p>\n

But she said Fulivai’s mood changed when he became jealous after another friend had come to the house.<\/p>\n

The woman said Fulivai had accused her of wanting to have sex with his friend.<\/p>\n

A police video made the day after her escape and played to the court shows the woman with bruises to her face.<\/p>\n

“It was supposed to be a one night stand,” she said in her interview.<\/p>\n

“When his friend came it just went the complete opposite way to anything I’d ever seen.”<\/p>\n

She said she tried to leave, but was scared and he convinced her to stay.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

ACT police officers found the victim running naked and screaming on a Lyneham street. (ABC News: Ian Cutmore)<\/p>\n

The woman described being hit repeatedly for hours and beaten with household objects.<\/p>\n

“The first couple of times \u2026 I kind of wasn’t expecting it, until I kind of picked up the pattern and knew it was coming so I would prepare myself,” she said.<\/p>\n

At one point he ordered her to take off her clothes, and threatened to kill her and her family.<\/p>\n

She said at another time he pressed a knife against her neck and chest and told her she would not leave alive.<\/p>\n

The jury also heard Fulivai had choked the woman to the point she passed out multiple times, and that she woke up to find him having sex with her.<\/p>\n

“I didn’t think I was going to make it out of there,” she said.Accused takes the stand<\/p>\n

Fulivai took to the stand during the trial<\/a>, telling the jury he had acted in self defence and saying the woman had “stitched him up” and that she deliberately “made that story up to the coppers”.<\/p>\n

He said he was assaulted by the woman, when two balaclava-wearing intruders began rummaging through his house.<\/p>\n

He claimed when he asked for help, the woman got up and assaulted him, including standing on a table to kick him in the head, hitting him with his mother’s crutch and stabbing him with a screwdriver.<\/p>\n

He admitted to striking the woman with the crutches several times “to discourage her from attacking” him, and hit and shoved her to get her away from him.<\/p>\n

But he denied choking, assaulting or ever having sex with the woman.<\/p>\n

“By no means was I violent. Aggressive, but not violent,” he said during cross examination.<\/p>\n

“This was self-defence.”<\/p>\n

‘Far-fetched and fanciful’<\/p>\n

Prosecutor Marina Lucero told the jury Mr Fulivai’s version of events “beggars belief”.<\/p>\n

She described his account as “far-fetched and fanciful”.<\/p>\n

She said there was no “logical explanation” for why the woman would run naked into the street to police on a winter’s night, if she’d been the aggressor.<\/p>\n

“If it was all a stitch-up, when did she have time to organise this? You’ve seen phone records,” she said.<\/p>\n

Ms Lucero said the woman had given a consistent account, and been candid about her drug use and lifestyle.<\/p>\n

The jury agreed, after beginning deliberating on Friday afternoon and delivering its verdict this morning.<\/p>\n

Fulivai will be sentenced later this year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Warning: This story contains details that may be distressing to some readers. Sexual assault\u00a0support lines: An ACT Supreme…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":513234,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[2666,25718,64,63,2667,256926,122866,83824,121722,1105,55313,2668,15455,44,256927,34901,6671,256925,125149,256928,16642],"class_list":["post-513233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-act","tag-act-supreme-court","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-canberra","tag-captive","tag-choking","tag-escape","tag-forcible-confinement","tag-guilty","tag-jury","tag-local-stories","tag-naked","tag-news","tag-north-lyneham","tag-ran","tag-sexual-assault","tag-sisituutuumata-fulivai","tag-street","tag-without-consent","tag-woman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=513233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513233\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/513234"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=513233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=513233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=513233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}