Tina Stileman was sitting on a park bench near her home when she read a legal judgment that made her sick to her stomach.
Three months earlier, a District Court jury had – after less than an hour of deliberation – unanimously declared the man she believes raped her was not guilty. It was a verdict she obviously did not hope for but always knew was a possibility. She had come to terms with it.
But the judgment she read while sitting in the park sparked a wave of emotions the verdict had not: humiliation, anger, sadness, severe distress. A judge had found her “meritless” rape prosecution was never going to result in a conviction. He said there was a severe lack of evidence indicating she did not consent to having sex with her alleged rapist, ordering the government to pay his legal bills.
The judgment, which followed similar criticism from other judges in sexual assault matters that never had any hope of conviction, would later become the tipping point for a state-wide audit of all rape cases. It would be intensely debated in state parliament, and circulated as gossip through the legal world.
Dozens of news stories would be written, along with opinion pieces on what appeared to be the failed state of rape prosecutions in the nation’s largest jurisdiction. Men’s rights activists who argue women lie about sexual assault would use her case as a weapon.
For Stileman, sitting alone on the park bench that day, only one thing rang through her mind. “I really felt like something else had been taken from me,” she told The Australian. “I would not have progressed the matter if I had had any idea that the prospects of success in terms of a guilty verdict were so low.”
Her comments come amid more than two years of turmoil within the NSW Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions.
Judges, barristers, solicitors and defendants have slathered criticism on the ODPP, claiming that running meritless rape cases impedes on trust in the justice system, sees men “falsely accused” of assault, and adds strain to already strained government funds. The ODPP and director Sally Dowling have always rejected this criticism.
For the first time, Stileman, a complainant, has publicly explained how being dragged through a trial that was apparently never likely to result in a conviction affected her.
She claims she repeatedly warned prosecutors she had no recollection of the incident and did not believe her testimony alone could secure a guilty conviction. She assumed they were sitting on a pile of evidence that would result in a favourable verdict but that pile never emerged.
“It does no service to complainants to take matters to trial that do not have prospects of success,” she says.
The alleged rape
The case centred on a meeting between Stileman and her alleged attacker, Paul Tyler, at a bar in Sydney’s inner west on August 14, 2019. The pair at the time were just friends, she says, despite having met on Tinder a year prior and having had a handful of casual sexual encounters throughout their relationship.
Stileman has just returned from an overseas trip. She planned to meet with her boyfriend that night, but agreed to catch up with Tyler for a drink that afternoon at the Native Rose Hotel in Rozelle. When she arrived, he had ordered them a beer each and they chatted casually. They had a second round of drinks, and then a third.
Stileman doesn’t remember anything after that until she woke up in Tyler’s bed.
“I was feeling extremely frightened, and in adrenaline overdrive – I just thought I had to get out immediately,” she wrote in her police statement.
“I had a racing heart and I remember leaving through the house and the front door, and that I left very quickly.”
The only other time she felt that frightened, she said, was when someone tried to kidnap her and her mother at gunpoint while travelling in Turkey.
Evidence adduced at trial showed she had had another two drinks, making five total. Two forensic pharmacologists explained the phenomenon of an alcoholic blackout – where seasoned drinkers can permanently lose their memory for periods while appearing to observers to be completely normal.
Stileman describes herself as the model complainant. After a teary phone call with her partner and an Uber to his house – during which she called a friend and told her what had happened – she visited the Royal Prince Alfred hospital. She told a triage nurse she was concerned she had been sexually assaulted and was sent to the specialist clinic. As she lay on her side on an examination table, a male doctor inspected and swabbed her genitals. He found two deep bruises.
“While he was doing that, I looked at the ceiling and there was a sticker decoration which had 15 birds in a tree,” she recalled.
She gave a blood and urine sample about 5.20am, about 14 hours after the two first met.
Alcohol was found in her system as well as sleeping medication, which she explained she had taken the night before the incident but could not recall taking the night of.
Male DNA was found on the vaginal swab.
Police case
Stileman provided a police statement nine days after, and another on September 11, 2019. Tyler was not charged until more than two years later on October 13, 2021. He was committed in June 2022, and faced court in February 2024 – more than four years after the incident.
Stileman says the process of the prosecution was worse than the process of going to hospital or making a police complainant.
She describes dealing with a witness assistance officer who she believes betrayed her confidence when passing information about therapy she had received on to police without her knowledge. She says when contacting witness support services to report this, she was forced to identify herself by Tyler’s name so they knew who they were speaking with.
“I know databases have their limits but this seems like a training issue to me,” she wrote in an email to the officer in October 2021. “I don’t want to be classified by the name of the name of the person who assaulted me.”
The officer escalated the matter to senior management and apologised for distress caused to Stileman. An ODPP spokesperson said the role of the witnesses assistance service was explained to complainants at the outset of proceedings, and the prosecution has a “fundamental obligation to disclose to the defence all material that is or may be relevant to the issues in the case”.
Day in court
When it came time to give evidence in court, Stileman says the room she used for remote testimony was in the same building as the trial. She was scared to leave and get cutlery for her lunch in case she ran into Tyler.
It was under cross-examination that she heard his version of events – that she had “aggressively” initiated oral sex. According to the costs judgment, Tyler testified Stileman had initiated intimacy. He said she appeared to be functioning normally, and the amount they drank was less than what was common for them.
“It’s an excruciating experience,” she says. “I’m not certain, I don’t think it was ever put to me that I was just lying, because of my lack of memory.
“It was put to me that I had been mistaken, that I’d engaged in a consensual interaction.”
Stileman can’t maintain that the incident wasn’t a consensual encounter, because she has no memory of it. But, she says, based on information available to her – the bruises, the blackout, finding her underwear on backwards – it is the most plausible explanation.
“The only person who will ever know that conclusively is the defendant,” she said.
Judge’s criticism
In his judgment awarding Tyler legal costs, judge Peter Whitford launched a scathing critique of the ODPP for bringing “meritless” rape accusations before the court, and urged judges not to “remain silent” on cases with no reasonable prospects of a conviction.
A few months before, judge Robert Newlinds had blasted “lazy and perhaps politically expedient” referrals of unverifiable rape allegations. Judge Penelope Wass, judge Gordon Lerve and acting judge Paul Conlon had made similar criticisms.
The NSW Judicial Commission later partially upheld a complaint filed by Ms Dowling against Judge Whitford, finding it was “entirely inappropriate” for him to suggest there was an “opaque, even secret, policy” that overrode prosecutorial guidelines in the state.
Judge Newlinds was temporarily removed from criminal trials after his comments.
Judge Whitford, in his judgment, said the version of events Stileman gave to police remained consistent throughout the trial process. However, he found that after she had given her testimony, the crown had no further evidence that she had not consented to intercourse with Tyler.
Stileman says she repeatedly warned prosecutors prior to trial that there was not enough evidence to secure a conviction. “The case was going to run on consent because there was the DNA evidence that proved sexual contact. I, to the best of my recollection, said to them ‘But I don’t remember anything’,” she said.
“I always thought ‘Well, it’s been certified. There must be stuff there. There must be enough there.’ I assumed there must be evidence or supporting material or something that I was not aware of to mean that the DPP had signed off on prospects.”
One case of many
The matter landed in NSW parliament in March 2024.
During a budget estimates session, Ms Dowling announced senior prosecutors would audit every sexual assault matter committed for trial in NSW as a way to “satisfy myself that there wasn’t a problem”.
The results found 11 of 327 rape cases committed did not adhere to prosecution guidelines, although Ms Dowling maintained many of the discontinued cases would have been dropped during the regular trial process.
Stileman makes no criticism of Judge Whitford or the jury in the matter.
She simply wants people to know the ODPP is not “brave” for taking matters to trial that should not be. “The narrative has become far too simplistic that it’s about being misunderstood, or that the DPP is being brave in some way by taking matters to trial that should not go to trial. That is not bravery. That is a squandering of public resources and just being cavalier with people’s hopes,” she says.
“If I had my time over, I would make a sexual assault reporting option report, which is the anonymous online report. I would not participate in a prosecution.”
An ODPP spokesperson said Stileman did not indicate she wanted to discontinue the prosecution midway through. “The ODPP takes its obligation to consult with complainants very seriously. Where a complainant indicates they do not wish to proceed, their views will be considered and may support a discretionary decision to discontinue the prosecution,” they said. “While the ODPP cannot comment on confidential communications in a particular matter, we can confirm this was not a case in which those considerations arose.”
The spokesperson noted the audit found “very high levels of compliance with the Prosecution Guidelines with no systemic issues identified”.
“The review identified opportunities for further improvement, including further training on complex evidentiary issues such as memory, intoxication and consent, particularly in cases where a complainant’s recollection is limited or fragmented (as in R v Smith (pseudonym)),” they said. “Increased training and additional resources have been provided on these issues.”
Stileman and Tyler’s names have been anonymised.
Ellie DudleyNational Chief of Staff