A low IQ illiterate alcoholic African refugee prostitute has been jailed for 18 months for forcing an intellectually disabled elderly woman into sexual slavery in Adelaide.
Stella Whitelaw, 54, was found guilty by a South Australia District Court jury in December last year of “using undue influence to get a person to perform commercial sexual acts” after pimping out her victim, who was in her late 60s and early 70s, for three years beginning in 2021.
Her trial heard that Whitelaw advertised herself and the woman online as “mother-daughter” prostitutes, forced her to “constantly” have sex with men, hit and threatened her, and kept the money for herself.
Whitelaw was caught after the woman’s carers took her to a GP for a check-up where she was diagnosed with gonorrhoea and admitted to hospital, The Advertiser reported at the time.
She denied the offending, claimed she provided massages with sexual services not sex, said she could not have placed the online ads because she can’t read and doesn’t know how to send text messages, and claimed she wouldn’t ask an “old woman who poo-poos on herself” to sell herself for sex.
Whitelaw faced the same court earlier this month where Judge Lisa Dunlop sentenced her for the sexual slavery offence, for damaging the property of a witness, and for breaching bail seven times since being released on home detention bail after she was convicted.
Judge Dunlop noted that Whitelaw was born in West Africa and came to Australia as a refugee in 2000 “in the hope of a better life”, was an alcoholic, and that a psychologist had determined Whitelaw was “all but illiterate” due to her basic education, and had an IQ in the bottom 1% of the population.
“I consider that you are a person who has been at much disadvantage in our society as a result of your intellectual capacity, your alcoholism, your language limitations and your limited education. I take all of those matters into consideration in sentencing you today,” Judge Dunlop told her.
“The offence that the jury convicted you of is obviously very serious. They found that you had taken advantage of a very vulnerable person in our society, and that verdict, I find, was a finding that you deliberately did so and over an extended period of time.
“There was ample opportunity for you to reflect on your behaviour, and there was ample opportunity for you to desist from that behaviour. I am obliged to place weight on the protection of the community, and that includes the protection of vulnerable people like your victim.
“I must consider the need for the penalty that I impose to deter you from similar offending in the future, and it must also deter others who might be attempted to exploit people in the way that you did. Although, as I have said, I have moderated this aspect of your sentence because of your intellectual capacity.”
Judge Dunlop said that while the maximum penalty for the undue influence charge was seven years, she was imposing a period of imprisonment of two years and nine months, along with sentences of five days for the property damage, and three days for each breach of bail offence.
She reduced the sentence by eight weeks to reflect the time Whitelaw had spent on “restrictive home detention bail”, resulting in a non-parole period of 18 months.
Header image: Stella Whitelaw outside court in 2025 (Adelaide Now).
