Serial sex offender William “Rob” Gilfillan, branded “Australia’s most evil dad”, has been sentenced to a further seven years and six months in prison after being found guilty in December of five more sex offences against two schoolgirls he taught in the 1980s, including penetrative offences.
Gilfillan, 69, is already serving a 48-year sentence for raping and torturing his biological daughter, Jess Denham, who waived her anonymity earlier this year. Ms Denham, who was born in 1992, was repeatedly raped by her father between the ages of five and 19 on their remote bush property inland of Byron Bay. He was convicted over those crimes in 2016 and will be 92 before he is eligible for parole.
Almost a decade before Jess was born, several Victorian schoolgirls reported Gilfillan in 1984, when he was a sports teacher at Traralgon High School, to education authorities for sexual abuse. The Victorian Department of Education conducted a full investigation and upheld the complaints, confirming the abuse had happened.
Gilfillan was not removed from the school. Instead, he was allowed to resign and quickly took up a job at Presentation College in Moe. He would later face further accusations of sexual abuse there and at other schools. Despite its own findings, the Victorian Department of Education did not contact Victoria Police.
Police did not interview the former students until 2013, after NSW Police investigated Jess Denham’s complaint and discovered the old Victorian Department of Education records. In 2014, nine extra charges were laid over the Traralgon High School allegations. But it then took another decade for the case to reach court, meaning the women who first complained in 1984 did not step inside a courtroom until 2025.
At trial last December, the Victorian County Court heard Gilfillan had a fetish involving metal instruments in his sexual abuse of children, though the details were too graphic to report. Jurors also heard that one girl was subjected to penile-vaginal penetration in the school gym, another student was digitally penetrated, and in another incident a female student was forced to masturbate Gilfillan in a staffroom while he told her “no one liked her”, that she “would never get a boyfriend because she was frigid”, and that she was “fat”.
Gilfillan denied the allegations and claimed his accusers had “jealous crushes” on him. He also described himself as a sporting “hero”. Because of the presumption of innocence, the jury was not told about his existing 73 convictions for pedophilic and child abuse offences outside Victoria. He was found guilty on five of the nine charges.
In the Victorian County Court, Chief Justice Amanda Chambers sentenced him to the additional term, describing the offences as “an appalling breach of trust”. She said teachers are meant to be “early role models” and “exemplars” for their students.
The judge also referred to the “profound and enduring harm” suffered by the victims. One woman, who was raped in the school gym, continues to experience “incapacitating effects” and was said to have been “robbed of her childhood, innocence, and hopes for her future”.
In a victim impact statement delivered to the court in April, a second victim said: “I stayed in a very dark place for a long time.” She said the abuse contributed to alcohol misuse, thoughts of self-harm and “self-hate”, and added: “I lost my teenage self, I lost those years of emotional and sexual development … I am angry he took that from me.”
Gilfillan sat with his arms crossed, shaking his head, in a white skivvy and black shorts. Chief Justice Chambers said he had shown no remorse, no contrition and no insight into his crimes, which he continues to deny. She said a recent psychological assessment found he was still undermining his victims and accusing them of fabricating their accounts.
His wife, Karen Gilfillan, who is also a convicted child sex offender, has likewise accused the two former schoolgirls of inventing the allegations and being “jealous” of her. Karen Gilfillan did not meet Rob Gilfillan until 1986, after the allegations had already been made and after the Victorian Department of Education had completed its investigation in 1984.
According to reports by The Australian, both Rob Gilfillan and Karen Gilfillan are currently appealing for a Governor’s Pardon in NSW.
Jess Denham said she hoped the former schoolgirls, whom the judge described as “vindicated”, felt “some measure of justice beginning to return to them”.
She said: “Perhaps one of the hardest truths of all, is that there were warnings. Allegations were made in the 80s … People spoke. Concerns were raised. Yet the systems meant to act did not follow through in the way they should have. That failure did not just fail one child. It failed many across four decades.”
Denham added: “The survivors who have carried this matter forward over so many years have shown extraordinary strength. Their courage deserves more than sympathy. It demands change. Justice matters. But the greater test is what we do next: that responsibility belongs to all of us.”
