Distressing content warning
A Fijian farm worker has been jailed for at least 12 years for anally raping a disabled stranger after breaking into her Melbourne home while hunting for a woman he was dating.
Samuela Turaganivalu, 34, was arrested at the airport while trying to flee the country days after the November 2024 attack, and charged with rape, threats to kill, aggravated burglary, intentionally causing injury and criminal damage.
He was found guilty by a jury in June, and appeared in the County Court of Victoria on Tuesday where Judge Gerard Mullaly described the attack as “every woman’s worst nightmare”, and jailed him for 16 years and four months, with a 12-year non-parole period.
The court heard the Turaganivalu, a rugby player described as a “powerful, large man”, came to Australia on an employment program to work in farms and factories two years prior to the attack, Newswire reported.
On the night of the rape he met a woman he was dating at a hotel for drinks just after midnight, but when she left without him he spent the next two hours trying to call her, and then turned up at a home where he believed she lived.
He tried and failed to gain entry to the home, broke the side mirrors off a car, climbed over the back fence of a neighbouring property, and entered the stranger’s home through an unlocked door.
Turaganivalu then woke his victim, who has physically and mental disabilities, punched her in the face multiple times, anally raped her, and threatened to return and kill her if she called police.
Judge Mullaly said the woman was left in such a state of “utter terror” that she was unable to call police, and told a friend instead who then called Triple-Zero.
“This is every woman’s nightmare – that someone with criminal, violent intent breaks into their house, overpowering them and raping them,” he said.
Police arrested Turaganivalu the following day over the damage to the car, and he was interviewed and released, but then stopped at the airport two days later while attempting to fly to Fiji on a one-way ticket.
His victim said the attack had stolen her confidence and independence, and she had quit her job because she was “too frightened to come home in the dark”.
“I wish I could have my old life back, but I cannot,” she said.
The judge said in sentencing that the victim’s parents had “spent a lifetime building their daughter’s independence, only for you, Mr Turaganivalu, to dismantle their efforts in one night”.
“Her parents have had to assist her more that previously because she now lacks confidence. You, of course, are the only one to blame for that,” he told the rapist in sentencing.
The court heard that Turaganivalu, who did not react when the sentence was handed down, would “almost certainly” be deported after serving his sentence.
Header image: The County Court in Melbourne (Canley – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link).
