Rape myths in the media reporting of the High-Profile Melbourne Man’s rape trial
A jury heard three weeks of evidence, legal argument and judicial directions before they found him guilty. Most readers saw only a headline filled with rape myths.
Rape myths and the act of rape are not separate subjects. The myths enable, justify, excuse, and minimise and dismiss the act.
Over the last three weeks a man known only as a High-Profile Melbourne Man (HPMM) was on trial for raping a woman who used to work for him. Rape myths permeated the trial, as they almost always do with rape trials. Media reporting on the trial, particularly in the headlines, often presents myths as if they’re facts and claims as if they’re evidence.
If this was one case, one trial, one rape, it would still matter but it wouldn’t be a structural danger. That danger exists when rape myths circulate from courtrooms to newsrooms to public beliefs to men’s choices to rape women, to police stations and back into courtrooms, where the cycle begins again.
After more than ten years monitoring media reporting of men’s violence against women, I’ve watched this cycle constantly reinventing itself and I know how much it permeates reporting on rape trials. I wanted to test the accuracy of my perception of this so, as part of a larger project, I collected every article I could find about HPMM’s trial for rape until the day the guilty verdict was reported. This is what I found.
Rape myths
First, a quick explanation of rape myths. I’ve written about them in detail here but the short version is that rape myths are a collection of false beliefs about what constitutes “real rape” (explored in more detail below). Anything that doesn’t follow the “real rape” script is either a woman’s vindictive lie or a man’s understandable mistake.
Rape is sexual penetration of another person’s body without their consent. They are the only factors that need to be present for rape to be real. Men perceived as “good guys” and “caring fathers” commit rape. Men who look like your brother, your dad, your mate, your hero or your priest commit rape. It is not dependent on anyone’s race or age and their relationship to the rapist is irrelevant. It does not need to involve weapons or visible physical injuries. Rape happens most often in private homes, but it can also happen in schools, workplaces, churches, sports clubs, theatres, libraries, houses of parliament, police stations, newsrooms, childcare centres, doctor’s offices, shops, pubs, hospitals and any other place you can imagine. Women rarely lie about rape or benefit from accusing a man of rape.
Research shows that even people who might reject a rape myth in a survey still rely on rape myths when they’re deciding whether to believe a woman’s account of rape.
Rape myths are the mechanism by which women’s reports of rape are routinely met with disdain and disbelief.
The reporting on HPMM’s trial for rape
Between 9 July, when the trial started and 28 July, when the guilty verdict was reported, I found 22 articles from Australian new media outlets reporting on the trial.
Rape myths in the headlines
Looking just at the headlines for now, of the 22 articles, 8 (36%) were factual or procedural.
HIGH-PROFILE BUSINESS FIGURE IN MELBOURNE FACING RAPE TRIAL AFTER NOT GUILTY PLEA (news.com.au, 17 July 2026)
PUBLIC FIGURE ON RAPE CHARGES (The Herald Sun, 9 July 2026)
RAPE TRIAL BEGINS FOR MELBOURNE MAN WHO CANNOT BE NAMED (The Age, 9 July 2026)
The other 64% included some form of rape myths.
The false allegation myth was present in 59% of all the headlines about HPMM’s trial and in 93% of the headlines that were not just factual or procedural. (I’ve expanded on the false allegations myth below.)
Statements by defence lawyers are the usual means of getting rape myths into headlines.
WOMAN TRIED TO ‘RUIN’ HIGH-PROFILE MAN WITH RAPE ALLEGATION, COURT HEARS (The Herald Sun, 22 July 2026)
RAPE ACCUSER’S CREDIBILITY ISSUE (The Herald Sun, 22 July 2026)
‘TRACK RECORD OF LIES’: JURY HEARS WOMAN HAD FINANCIAL MOTIVE FOR ACCUSING HIGH-PROFILE MAN OF RAPE (The Herald Sun, 23 July 2026)
RAPE-ACCUSED MELBOURNE IDENTITY CLAIMS WOMAN IS LYING (The Canberra Times, 8 July 2026)
WOMAN IN MELBOURNE BUSINESSMAN RAPE CASE TOLD ‘LIE AFTER LIE’, DEFENCE SAYS (ABC News, 22 July, 2026)
Why this matters
Australian readers, saturated with American legal dramas in their streaming services, could easily assume that, as in the American system, lawyers in Australia can’t give evidence, they can only make arguments and test evidence through witnesses. Not so. In Australia, a barrister in an opening or closing address can advance a proposition that is never accepted by the jury. A contention put in cross-examination is not evidence, it’s just a claim, and as respected researchers Dr Quilter and Dr Macnamara showed in their detailed investigation, defence lawyers in rape trials rely heavily on rape myths when they make those contentions. This doesn’t make them true, and it doesn’t mean the jury believed it.
Readers who don’t understand those distinctions could very easily believe the claims quoted in headlines are facts tested in court rather than emotive, subjective arguments by defence lawyers trying to persuade a jury that their client is not a rapist, he’s an innocent victim of a wicked, manipulative liar (aka a woman).
‘TRACK RECORD OF LIES’: JURY HEARS WOMAN HAD FINANCIAL MOTIVE FOR ACCUSING HIGH-PROFILE MAN OF RAPE (The Herald Sun, 23 July 2026).
Just reading that headline alone, many readers are unlikely to realise that this quote was from a defence lawyer, and the financial motive was the defence lawyer’s contention, not evidence tested and accepted by the court.
A jury heard all the evidence presented in court. They didn’t just see a few dramatic moments in news reports, they were there for three weeks hearing all the evidence, the lawyer’s arguments and the judge’s instructions. They found HPMM guilty, beyond reasonable doubt. That is a high standard and a rare outcome.
While most of the non-factual headlines I’ve ever seen about rape trials use rape myths to impugn the victim, even well intentioned headlines can incorporate rape myths and subtly reinforce the myth that women typically lie about rape.
ALLEGED RAPE VICTIM ‘COULD HAVE DONE A LOT BETTER’ IF SHE HAD MADE UP CLAIMS AGAINST WELL-CONNECTED MELBOURNE MAN, COURT TOLD (The Guardian, 22 July, 2026)
The Guardian’s only headline that was coded as include rape myths was not derogatory to the woman who was raped by HPMM. It was coded this way because it repeated a quote by a lawyer that buys into the myth that women do lie about rape and when they lie, they do it really well.
Although many headlines relied on rape myths, the articles themselves were often far more factual and provided considerably more context than the headlines implied. For example, the article with one of the most egregious headlines - “Woman tried to ‘ruin high profile man with rape allegation, court hears” – was more about the prosecution case than the defence case. It gave far more space to the prosecutor’s rebuttal of the defence lawyer’s claims than it did to the claims themselves.
Who relies on rape myths for headlines?
While the Herald Sun was the most prolific in producing rape myth headlines, all publishers used rape myth headlines except The Age (which surprisingly did not have much coverage, only reporting that the trial had started and the verdict). The Canberra Times only published one story so while their percentage is inflated they didn’t contribute the most to the proliferation of rape myths in headlines for this trial.
Who reads beyond the headlines?
Most people get their news from social media rather than directly from new sites, where they are more likely to read headlines than articles and their beliefs are influenced by the wording of those headlines.
A 2024 Penn State University study of 35 million news links circulated on Facebook found that 75% of the time they were shared without the link being clicked or read. The authors concluded that most people share news articles based just on the headline and preview text. Image-based platforms such as Instagram and TikTok exacerbate this problem when the content is almost always just a screenshot of the headline. Typically, there is no link included and most of the time when it is, it’s not a clickable link. A reader would have to manually copy a URL, paste it into a browser, and, in the case of The Herald Sun, get through the paywall before they could find out the context of the headline. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that most people are not going to do that.
Social media also connects people (primarily boys and men) to the manosphere – whether they want it to or not.
Analysis of over 22 million posts in the manosphere over 14 years found that it is growing in size, toxicity and misogynistic content. Digging into the content of the manosphere shows the myth that false allegations are common and dangerous is rife across all groups.
Fast moving feeds, designed to make people angry, algorithmically focused on teaching men and boys to fear and distrust women, are unlikely places for readers to critically engage with content or investigate the context of a headline that says (again) that women lie about rape to hurt men.
Can journalists do better?
Of course they can – within some limits. At the very least, sticking to fact based headlines rather than myth based headlines would be a significant improvement.
It’s very common in my Fixed It social media posts for commenters to ask why I don’t name and shame the journalist. Not only do I not do this, but I also deliberately block out the bylines so no one else can do it. Mostly this is because I know that journalists very rarely write their own headlines. They’re written by editors and sub-editors in the newsroom and they can change on the same story across different mastheads and formats. There is no possible way to know who wrote the headlines and I’ve heard from enough journalists who were disgusted by the headline someone put on their otherwise reasonable and factual reporting to know that this would be unjustifiably hurtful.
Also, even if the journalist did write the headlines (as happens occasionally) this is a structural problem and shaming one person turns institutionalised patterns into a single person’s failing. Breaking the cycle that churns rape myths through public institutions and public perceptions must be bigger than any one person, or even any one publication.
There are other limits in what the reporters can do.
Court reporters are supposed to be neutral recorders of fact. Their job is to tell their readers what happened in court, they cannot include anything that might imply their own opinion of the case, the witnesses or the accused. They also can’t add any information not submitted at trial. To do so would be contempt of court. It could give the accused grounds for a mistrial or an appeal.
For example, if a court reporter believed a defence lawyer was relying too heavily on rape myths in their defence (as research shows that many defence lawyers do) it would be contempt of court to include that research in the court reports. Nor could they include in their report that the Australian Law Reform Commission (not, historically, a particularly feminist organisation) recently found that rape myths are persistent across the entire legal system and present considerable barriers to achieving conviction in rape cases.
Ten years of the Fixed It project
I started the Fixed It project back in 2015. Fixed It monitors news headlines about men’s violence against women and corrects them when they overtly blame victims, erase perpetrators or excuse crimes. This is a topic I know very well and I’ve had a long time to recognise patterns and see trends. Reporting on domestic and family violence has improved since 2015. There’s undoubtedly still more work to do but overall I see far less victim blaming and far more reporting on structural issues than I used to.
However, we have barely moved the dial in reporting on sexual violence. There’s little context, few reports beyond crime and court reporting and almost all of it is still as permeated by rape myths as it was when I started this project. This tracks with what Kristine Ziwica reported in The Saturday Paper last week: sexual violence is typically tacked onto the end of action on domestic violence (when it’s recognised at all) despite evidence that more men are committing more rapes while their accountability for those rapes is decreasing.
Rape myths in court
A book just published by researchers Dr Julia Quilter and Dr Luke McNamara examined transcripts from over 100 rape trials in NSW and Victoria. They found the false allegations myth was raised in almost every instance of cross-examination in the trials they examined (95% in NSW and 88% in Vic). Their research showed that rape myths are a constant presence in rape trials, used primarily by defence lawyers, but also relied on by judges, witnesses, juries and even prosecutors. These myths can influence verdicts, traumatise women who have been raped and then have to give evidence at trial (which has often been described as almost more traumatic than the rape itself). It can also discourage women from reporting rape to police and strongly influence how police respond to the few rapes that are reported. These findings have been shown repeatedly in robust research, such as this one, this one, this one… I could go on and on. I’ve got a database of over 100 peer reviewed papers on rape myths and I can’t find one reliable piece of research that says rape trials don’t rely on rape myths.
So it’s worth digging into the myths and facts a bit more deeply.
Rape myths set up a script for “real rape” and then say that anything outside this script is a lie or a mistake by a poor sad man who couldn’t be expected to know any better.
The “real rape” script says rape happens when where a pure, innocent (white) girl is attacked at night in a public place by man she does not know. He is an immediately recognisable monster motivated by overwhelming and deviant lust for her beauty. He uses physical force to penetrate her vagina with his penis. She screams, fights back and receives visible physical injuries. After the rape, her attacker flees, and she immediately reports the rape to police, where her story is taken seriously, her injuries are documented, her attacker is identified, and the case quickly proceeds to trial. She cries every time she talks about the rape but is never angry, vengeful, or numb. Tears and increased dependence on White Knight men to protect her are the only sign of trauma she ever displays. From the very first report to police right through to the cross examination at trial, she remembers, in precise chronological order, all the details of the attack and this recollection is unwavering regardless of time or circumstance.
Anything that deviates from this script means it wasn’t a ‘real rape’ and the victim becomes the suspect. Not only is her credibility diminished and the devastation of being raped erased by these deviations, but her alleged rapist becomes the object of sympathy. If she’s not a pure young girl and it wasn’t a real rape, she must be a vindictive liar. She is getting back at a good man who rejected her lewd advances, or she’s after the buckets of cash the victimised men pay bad women to reclaim their good name, or she’s hiding her immoral activities from the judgement of more worthy observers.
Myth: Women lie about rape (the false allegation myth)
The myths about false allegations are a subset and an outcome of the “real rape” script. If rape is only “real” when an immediately identifiable monster jumps out of a dark alley to violently overpower a pure (aka: white) young girl then anything that happens between “but he’s such a nice guy” and a woman who isn’t pure enough to deserve protection from rape, well, clearly she’s just lying. Why would she lie? Because she’s a vindictive, malicious, crazy, gold-digging bitch who is out to punish a man for rejecting her or hide her sexual indiscretions or more often than not, she’s hoping to get access to that vast bucket of cash that men seem to think is available to women who report rape to police.
False allegations are rare. It’s difficult to establish exactly how many but best estimates put it at about 5% of all rapes reported to police and research shows that most of those are not based on malice. Further, the very rare false reports of rape that make it to court usually don’t result in conviction.
Most women don’t report rape to police. By my calculations (using data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics), women are more than 200 times more likely to not report rape than to make a false allegation.
Myth: Men can’t control their need for sex
The National Community Attitudes Survey used to test this myth. In the 2017 survey one third of respondents agreed that “rape results from men not being able to control their need for sex”. They didn’t ask that question again in the 2021 survey, but they did ask how many people agreed that “when a man is very sexually aroused, he may not even realise that the woman doesn’t want to have sex”. Just over 30% of young men agreed.
In other words, around one third of young men already believe that men are not responsible for their choice to rape a woman because men can’t be expected to control themselves when they’re aroused.
So this headline, which would have been fine without that quote, quietly reinforces the myth without anyone ever needing to read the article.
‘I can’t stop’: High-profile Victorian fronts court accused of rape
Impact beyond the woman who was raped
Most of this article is about the bigger picture. The structural and institutional contributions to rape myths. But every rape is about people. The person who was raped (usually but not always a woman) and the person who chose to rape her (almost always a man).
In this case, a woman – a very young woman – was raped by a man she used to work for. When she reported this man to police, as women are routinely told to do, he lied to police about the rape. Then he waited for three years through all the pre-trial hearings until he sat in court and watched his lawyer tell her, the court, and the jury that she lied. That she had no credibility. That she was vindictive, mercenary, unstable, deceitful and cruel. He, too, could have read all those headlines.
I can’t imagine what it must have been like for her to go through all that. To hold herself together and give her evidence in front of him and an intimidating room full of strangers and to then have to see headlines like this
WOMAN TRIED TO ‘RUIN’ HIGH-PROFILE MAN WITH RAPE ALLEGATION, COURT HEARS (The Herald Sun, 22 July 2026)
Now after the trial is over and he’d been found guilty, none of the journalists or news outlets will apologise to her for what they said and implied about her during the trial. None of them will retract or even remove the headlines they wrote about her. They just carry on until the next trial and then they’ll do it all over again.
And so, the cycle continues.
AI declaration: I do not use AI for writing or research. I do use ChatGPT occasionally to find research papers (academic databases search engines are rubbish) and for proofreading because I hate typos and without an editor my writing is full of them. Mostly I stay away from using AI for writing because the few times I tried it the results were so incomplete and unreliable that it ended up being faster and better to do it myself. I’m told AI has improved significantly since then, but I’ve chosen to not explore this because I don’t want to be tempted away from the complex imperfection of my own thoughts, voice and analysis.
I have sometimes used AI to create images, and they are all labelled as such. Graphs and data are all my own work from spreadsheets I create myself and data I download from reliable sources such as the ABS.
