Silvagni, the 23-year-old youngest son of Carlton Hall of Famer Stephen Silvagni and former TV presenter Jo Silvagni, reacted with shock, clutching his head in his hands and throwing the full weight of his body back into his chair.<\/p>\n
Stephen Silvagni and his wife Jo said they stand “firmly behind” their son. Photo \/ NewsWire, Valeriu Campan<\/p>\n
Seven days later, the woman he raped spoke powerfully as she addressed him<\/a> during a pre-sentence hearing on Friday.<\/p>\n \u201cYou were my friend, someone I thought I could trust \u2026 and today you don\u2019t get to interrupt me, you don\u2019t get to twist my words,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Rape carries a maximum penalty of 25 years in Victoria.<\/p>\n Addressing the court, Crown prosecutor Jeremy McWilliams said Silvagni\u2019s offending was made more serious by the \u201ccunning deceptions\u201d and \u201cpersistent dishonesty\u201d taken to \u201cquite extraordinary lengths\u201d in an effort to avoid accountability.<\/p>\n \u201cTo deny her experience of reality demonstrates a real moral culpability and real moral deficit, a real lack of empathy, a real sense of entitlement,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n During the trial, jurors heard the woman was invited to the extravagant Silvagni home in Balwyn North by a friend of hers \u2013 Silvagni\u2019s girlfriend.<\/p>\n She arrived shortly after midnight and spent a period of time socialising with Silvagni, his girlfriend and a friend of his, a man with whom she\u2019d had a previous casual sexual relationship.<\/p>\n Later that night, the woman and the other man had consensual sex while staying in a guest bedroom.<\/p>\n But, shortly before 2am, the other man decided he needed to leave.<\/p>\n He gave evidence to the jury that he woke Silvagni up as he needed to move his car outside of the Silvagnis\u2019 gate, before departing in an Uber at 1.57am.<\/p>\n Silvagni\u2019s barrister, David Hallowes SC, argued during the pre-sentence hearing that what came next must have had a \u201crelative degree of spontaneity\u201d because his client clearly thought the other man would be staying the night.<\/p>\n Silvagni opened the door of the guest bedroom, falsely claiming his friend\u2019s Uber had cancelled and he would return upstairs.<\/p>\n About five minutes later the door reopened and a man, clearly Silvagni on the jury\u2019s verdict, quickly entered the darkly-lit room.<\/p>\n At trial, Silvagni strenuously denied it was him that entered the room and maintained he did not rape the woman.<\/p>\n Outside court on Friday, his father said they were considering appeal options.<\/p>\n The woman told the court the man climbed into bed with her and inserted his fingers into her vagina.<\/p>\n She said she reacted with shock, telling him \u201cno\u201d, and wriggling her body away.<\/p>\n Quickly, she said, she began to suspect it was Silvagni and not the second man after recognising his voice.<\/p>\n The jury was told Silvagni maintained he was the other man when directly challenged about it, saying: \u201cYeah it\u2019s me, why wouldn\u2019t it be?\u201d<\/p>\n He pinned the woman\u2019s hands behind her back and held her body down, and again penetrated her with his fingers.<\/p>\n She gave evidence she got a hand free and reached up where she felt his long hair.<\/p>\n \u201cTom I know it\u2019s you, you\u2019re the only guy left in the house,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n The jury heard Silvagni quickly left the room, slamming the door behind him.<\/p>\n She left in an Uber about 2.30am, but not before Silvagni stopped her in the hallway, asking what was going on and requesting a hug.<\/p>\n On the ride home she began telling people what happened, including her mother, two friends and Silvagni\u2019s girlfriend.<\/p>\n In the early hours of the morning the following day, Silvagni edited his friend\u2019s Uber receipt to falsely show he left the Silvagni home an hour later than he did.<\/p>\n At trial, Silvagni\u2019s defence conceded this happened but suggested it was done not to avoid responsibility, but out of panic.<\/p>\n \u201cMight it just be a young man panicking when allegations are made about something he didn\u2019t do?\u201d Hallowes questioned in his opening remarks.<\/p>\n Some six hours after the rape, Silvagni began trying to contact his friend. He sent a message saying \u201cyou awake?\u201d and placing two unanswered phone calls.<\/p>\n The pair shared two calls between 9.47am and 10.01am, the details of which were unknown.<\/p>\n But in messages a day or two later, Silvagni urged the friend to lie and \u201cjust say you came into [the woman\u2019s] room when your Uber cancelled\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t know what\u2019s going on but I just want to make sure [her] lies don\u2019t f*** us up,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The woman reported the incident to police and 13 days after the rape, she called Silvagni, with the conversation secretly recorded by police.<\/p>\n He falsely claimed his friend had told him he\u2019d actually come back into the room and that he was \u201creally drunk\u201d and said the night was \u201call a bit of a blur\u201d.<\/p>\n Silvagni pressured the woman to move on with her life and forget about it.<\/p>\n Addressing the court on Friday, the woman said the time since she was raped, almost two years ago, had taken an enormous toll on her.<\/p>\n \u201cWhile you tried to avoid responsibility I had to face the trauma face-on,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cEvery deflection, every excuse made my healing harder.<\/p>\n \u201cYou lied directly into the confusion you created \u2026 the fear you caused me didn\u2019t come just from the assault, you made me not trust myself.\u201d<\/p>\n The woman said his actions had caused her to second guess every new connection or interaction with people.<\/p>\n She told the court Silvagni tried to rewrite the truth, doctored evidence and asked others to lie for him, but the truth \u201cstood solid\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cTom Silvagni, you raped me not once but twice,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cYou know this, I know this, and now so does everyone else.\u201d<\/p>\n Silvagni will be sentenced on Wednesday.<\/p>\n Sign up to Herald Premium Editor\u2019s Picks<\/a>, delivered straight to your inbox every Friday. Editor-in-Chief Murray Kirkness picks the week\u2019s best features, interviews and investigations. Sign up for Herald Premium here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Silvagni, the 23-year-old youngest son of Carlton Hall of Famer Stephen Silvagni and former TV presenter Jo Silvagni,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":181099,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[68501,4619,74,17094,9218,11164,115121,55604,3989,12632,71,28024,115122,1454,9093,19475,111,139,69,34458,12860,1963,115119,115118,213,4758,5134,115120],"class_list":["post-181098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-accountability","tag-act","tag-after","tag-avoid","tag-before","tag-began","tag-deceptions","tag-deciding","tag-effort","tag-friend","tag-from","tag-girlfriend","tag-illfated","tag-immediately","tag-lies","tag-minutes","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-rape","tag-revealed","tag-series","tag-silvagni","tag-silvagnis","tag-sports","tag-taking","tag-tom","tag-weave"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181098"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181098\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/181099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}A court sketch of Tom Silvagni at his plea hearing on Friday. Photo \/ NewsWire \/ Anita Lester<\/p>\n