Inside the dramatic downfall of 'sugar daddy' plastic surgeon who lost his career, reputation and marriage
A former leading plastic surgeon who used sugar daddy websites to contact and pay girls as young as 13 for sex has had 'a spectacular fall from grace'.
Defence barrister Philip Strickland told Newcastle District Court how Richard Sackelariou, 70, had lost everything after his life changed dramatically in 2017 when he had major surgery and was required to wear a colostomy bag for five years.
Mr Strickland said Sackelariou, who had practices in Sydney and Melbourne and was married with two children, started using pornography before visiting sugar daddy websites after his wife no longer wanted to have sex following the surgery.
Sackelariou's initial preference on the sugar daddy sites was for women aged 18-24 but even when he knew his victims were under 18, he continued to have sex with them.
He paid six girls aged between 13 to 15 he had mostly met through the sites to join him in hotel rooms in Sydney, Newcastle and Queensland, between September 2021 and October 2022.
He pleaded guilty to 10 charges, including five counts of causing a child aged between 14 and 18 to do an act of prostitution, one count of using a carriage service to procure someone under the age of 16 for sexual activity and one count of causing a child aged 14 or over to make child abuse material.
Sackelariou agreed to plead guilty to the ten charges after the Crown dropped 30 other charges, including eight counts of having sexual intercourse with a child aged between 10 and 14.
Mr Strickland told a sentence hearing on Tuesday that Sackelariou had been well-respected in the community before his arrest.
'Family, friends, career, reputation, gone. It's a spectacular fall from grace for this man.'
Sackelariou told the court he was ashamed.
'I'm appalled at that person... that I created such harm and damage,' he said.
'I interposed myself during their sexual development, corrupted their normal sexual development.'
Sackelariou said statements read out in a closed court from two of his victims had been horrific for him to hear.
He said his wife, who is suffering from liver cancer, had been very upset and angry with him after his arrest and had since divorced him. His two sons refused to talk to him.
Questioned by prosecutor Kristy Mulley, Sackelariou admitted he never thought about how his crimes would affect his victims and their families.
Ms Mulley said: 'Even when you find out these girls are under 18, you continued to pursue them.'
Sackelariou replied: 'With these individuals, that is what happened. I pursued them after I learnt they weren't the age they stated they were.'
Sackelariou would offer to pay the girls for naked photos before arranging to meet at various hotel rooms. He would always hand over the cash in a white envelope.
He offered one 15-year-old girl from Sydney $1000 for sex but when she refused, he increased the offer to $3500 for 30 minutes and they met at the Chatswood Quest apartments.
Sackelariou will be sentenced on Friday.
1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732)
National Sexual Abuse and Redress Support Service 1800 211 028
Kids Helpline 1800 55 1800 (for people aged five to 25)
Sackeleriou will learn his fate when he is sentenced at Newcastle District Court on Friday
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Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
I could hear gasps in the courtroom as the ‘mushroom poisoner' finally took the stand and revealed why she survived – when three others died: GUY ADAMS lays bare a lie by Erin Patterson even the prosecution hasn't mentioned
For five weeks, the fate of Erin Patterson has hinged on a single, contested question: how did she survive the toxic meal that left three of her guests dead and the fourth in a near-fatal coma? On Wednesday, we finally got the answer. Or rather, we got Erin's version of the answer, via a blow-by-blow account of the fateful day that she made beef wellington, using poisonous death cap mushrooms, then served it to members of her estranged husband Simon's family for lunch. It was the 50-year-old housewife's third day in the witness box of a tiny court in Morwell, a mining town roughly two hours' drive south-east of Australia's second city, Melbourne, and half an hour from her home in Leongatha, where these tragic events played out. Erin is standing trial for the murder of three of her guests: Simon's elderly parents Don and Gail, along with Gail's sister Heather Wilkinson, in a case that has drawn global attention to this corner of rural Victoria. She is also charged with the attempted murder of the fourth: Gail's husband Ian, a local Baptist pastor. The Crown's case is simple. It says she used the internet to locate and pick death cap mushrooms during the growing season, in April 2023, before preserving them in a food dehydrator. Three months later, she allegedly added them to a 'duxelles', or mushroom paté, used to make the four individual beef wellingtons she served to the alleged victims. Erin's own dish was, prosecutors claim, free from any poisonous fungi. She, however, insists otherwise, and has pleaded 'not guilty' to all charges. But prior to Monday's shock announcement that, in the words of her barrister Colin Mandy, 'the defence will call Erin Patterson', her case had been light on details of that deadly lunch. That has now changed. Erin Trudi Patterson, who had thus far spent this marathon trial sitting silently in the dock, occasionally dabbing her eyes with a tissue, has since spent five days, and more than 20 hours, giving evidence under oath. At times, she's seemed intelligent, composed and commanding. On others, frantic, evasive and downright dishonest. I've been there for almost every second, sometimes watching in person, from a few yards away, and sometimes from an overflow room across the first-floor landing of Latrobe Valley Magistrates Court where the small army of reporters and TV crews who are unable to fit into the half dozen Press seats are permitted to scrutinise the soap-opera proceedings via video link. It was here that, to gasps audible both inside and outside the courtroom, Erin sought on Wednesday afternoon to explain how, exactly, she managed to avoid falling ill. Twisting in her chair, and at times blinking as quickly as she spoke, the mother-of-two alleged that she'd been 'fighting a never-ending battle of low self-esteem most of my adult life', which revolved largely around 'issues with body image' and weight gain. What's more, she claimed that since her 20s she had been secretly suffering from bulimia, an eating disorder characterised by binge eating and subsequent vomiting. A compulsion to gorge herself on food had, she added, struck shortly after her guests had departed from the fatal meal, on Saturday July 29, 2023. Describing how she had cleared away leftovers, including roughly two-thirds of an orange cake that Gail, 70, had brought for dessert, Erin told the jury: 'I kept cleaning up the kitchen and putting everything away and, um, I had a piece of cake.' There followed a short pause. 'And then,' she added, 'I had another piece of cake. And then another.' 'How many pieces of cake did you have?' asked Mandy. 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Erin's condition subsequently improved, and she appears to have been more or less back to normal by Tuesday. That's what she told her counsel Colin Mandy, at least. His defence will now be built around the ingenious proposition that the 'Mushroom Cook' was, effectively, saved by bulimia. Importantly, Erin will also contest claims that she used a different coloured plate to her four lunch guests, in what the prosecution suggested was an attempt to ensure she didn't accidentally eat a poisonous beef wellington. Ian Wilkinson, the sole surviving guest, has told the court that they ate off grey plates while Erin used an orange one. Police photographs of her home taken a few days later appear to show two grey plates adjacent to the dishwasher. Erin insists, however, that she doesn't own any grey plates and instead used 'a couple of black, a couple of white, and one that's red on top and black underneath'. Whether the jury agrees is, of course, another matter. And that brings us to the two-and-a-half days Erin has since spent being subjected to hostile cross-examination by prosecutor Nanette Rogers, an austere character who approaches her task with the severity of a schoolmistress on the wrong end of a vulgar classroom prank. Yet this has been an altogether more gruelling – and more combative – experience. Erin is occasionally prone to tearfulness, and both sides accept that she has, at times, been a prodigious liar. With this perhaps in mind, Rogers has yet to address her alleged bulimia, but has instead focused on a number of intriguing sub-plots that form part of the prosecution case. One involves the provenance of the death cap mushrooms, which are relatively rare in this region of Australia, but sometimes grow under oak trees in the rainy months of April and May. According to mobile phone data analysed by police experts, Patterson visited two nearby small towns, Outtrim on April 22, and Loch on 28. At both locations, sightings of death caps had been logged a few days earlier on an internet site named iNaturalist. Analysis of a computer seized from Patterson's home suggests she had used iNaturalist and had used it to search for local locations of death caps a year before. In a gripping exchange yesterday, Rogers directly asked a strikingly evasive Patterson if she'd been responsible for those web searches. 'It's possible. I don't know,' came her response. Did she have an interest in death cap mushrooms? 'Depends what you mean by interest,' came her reply. As to whether she'd been to Loch on April 28, Patterson stated: 'I don't know.' Asked if she'd gone there to look for death cap mushrooms, she replied simply: 'Disagree.' Another sub-plot involves a food dehydrator, which Patterson had purchased on April 28, the day she allegedly visited Loch. The machine was used to preserve field mushrooms, including specimens Patterson bought at supermarkets and then ground into powder to add to muffins and other food she prepared for her children. But laboratory tests of the machine found traces of death caps on it too. The prosecution argues that the dehydrator was deliberately used to preserve the deadly fungi, so Patterson could use them to poison her relatives months later. But Erin insists that the death caps were foraged by mistake and, after being dried, transferred into a Tupperware container filled with dehydrated mushrooms from a Chinese supermarket. She claims to have then used products from that container when preparing her 'duxelles', after taste tests of the initial mixture revealed it to be 'a little bland'. In other words, it was all a terrible accident. Of particular interest, given this debate, are photographs found on a Samsung tablet seized from Erin's home. 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Daily Mail
an hour ago
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Daily Mail
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