A woman has admitted raping a male prison officer before later telling him she could do as she pleased because “no one would believe” him, a court has heard.
Stephanie Dadd-Zammit, 35, pleaded guilty in Melbourne County Court on Thursday to four offences, including rape by compelling sexual penetration.
Dadd-Zammit had been due to stand trial, with a jury already empanelled and the case ready to begin, but entered guilty pleas to all charges shortly before proceedings got underway.
Prosecutors told the court the offending stemmed from an incident in September 2024 involving a man she had met on Tinder.
The court heard the pair had engaged in consensual sex on several occasions after matching on the dating app. However, prosecutors said Dadd-Zammit’s behaviour became increasingly erratic after the man told her he no longer wanted to continue seeing her.
According to the prosecution summary, the first warning sign came after the man ejaculated during unprotected sex and asked Dadd-Zammit to take the morning-after pill. The court heard she initially refused.
Dadd-Zammit later sent the victim a Snapchat photo of herself taking the pill.
According to the prosecution’s allegations submitted to the court, Dadd-Zammit became upset when she found out the victim had an ‘active profile’ on Tinder.
Stephanie Dadd-Zammit, 35, pleaded guilty on Thursday to rape by compelling sexual penetration. Court documents state she was employed at Crown Casino (pictured)
Dadd-Zammit told the victim she was ‘disappointed’ that they were ‘seeking different things’.
She was also ‘unhappy the relationship was over’ and told the victim that she was ‘going to go to work drunk’ and ‘unhinged’.
‘I warned you from the very beginning,’ Dadd-Zammit told the man.
On September 6, 2024, Dadd-Zammit – who pleaded guilty to using a carriage service to harass – rang the victim 99 times between 12.59am and 2.13am.
According to allegations tendered to the court, at 12.38am, the victim received ‘some kind of text-to-speech digital program’ audio message prior to the ‘barrage of calls’.
‘She is going to dox you. You don’t know who her family is. She is currently in a split, which means she no longer cares about herself or anything. Get the IVO now before anything. She deserves to pay for her behaviour for once. She forgets s***. I have her Google account and Snap on my MacBook. I warn c***s about her. Run. Good luck,’ the audio message said.
The victim was ‘worried’ he would be doxxed – that is, have his personal information exposed online – because Dadd-Zammit had been in his house ‘unsupervised with access to his private documents and things’, the prosecution alleged.
He attempted to transcribe the audio message but accidentally sent it to a number belonging to Dadd-Zammit.
Dadd-Zammit met her victim on Tinder (stock image)
The victim received a text message from a person purporting to be ‘Anton’ who claimed to be an ex-boyfriend of Dadd-Zammit’s.
Police later discovered it was Dadd-Zammit herself.
According to the summary of allegations, ‘Anton’ warned the victim against becoming ‘entangled’ with Dadd-Zammit, whom ‘Anton’ described as being an ‘evil c***’.
However, ‘Anton’ also encouraged the victim to contact Dadd-Zammit because he would be ‘rewarded if he did so and punished if he did not’.
‘Anton’ also emphasised how loyal Dadd-Zammit could be and, if intoxicated, she would be ‘putty in [the victim’s] hands’.
The alias also told the man he had to remain ‘brutally honest’ with Dadd-Zammit because ‘the moment she senses bulls***, she will go AWOL’.
The victim subsequently drove to Dadd-Zammit’s home and was able to convince her to jump in his car and go for a ride.
Dadd-Zammit, who ‘appeared intoxicated and angry’, asked the victim to drive her to his house. When she got inside, she told him he had ‘made the biggest mistake of [his] f**ing life’.
‘I’m not leaving unless the f***ing police are called,’ Dadd-Zammit said.
Dadd-Zammit then drank wine she found in the victim’s pantry and ‘made various statements about how she was splitting’.
Splitting is a term used in psychiatry for when a person sees everything as black or white and is associated with borderline personality disorder.
Dadd-Zammit drank for almost two hours before telling the victim that she was going to his bed and they could ‘talk further there’.
The victim said he did not want to sleep with her. When he went to his bedroom, he found Dadd-Zammit ‘fully naked’ on his bed.
Dadd-Zammit attempted to kiss the victim but he kept turning his head away, according to court documents.
‘If you don’t take off your pants you will see the real me and you will be f***ing scared,’ Dadd-Zammit allegedly told the victim.
The victim pulled his tracksuit pants down to the knee in an ‘effort to appease her’ but maintained that he did not want to have sex.
According to the prosecution allegations, Dadd-Zammit climbed onto the victim and held his arms at his side.
Dadd-Zammit also knelt on the victim’s legs as he ‘laid prone’ and this prevented him from moving.
Dadd-Zammit then raped the victim by compelling sexual penetration. She performed non-consensual fellatio until he was erect then climbed up his body and attempted to use his penis to penetrate her.
‘Please stop, Steph. I don’t want to do this,’ the crying victim begged as his penis made contact with her vagina, but he could not tell where. Dadd-Zammit replied that she was going to get what she wanted from the man.
Had she not pleaded guilty, the prosecution was expected to argue that the victim having an erection in response to Dadd-Zammit’s ‘manipulation’ was not an ‘indication of desire for or consent to any sexual activity on his part’.
The prosecution alleged that as Dadd-Zammit attempted to mount the victim, she placed her hand on his throat. Every time he said ‘no’, she tightened her grip.
The victim recalled Dadd-Zammit’s grip was ‘not painful’ but that he was ‘finding it harder and harder to breathe’. He did not consent to the choking.
The man became ‘fearful that he might get hurt or be further sexually assaulted’, so he pushed Dadd-Zammit off him.
According to court documents, Dadd-Zammit ‘stood up over him on the bed’ and told him she could ‘get what the f*** I want because I’m a f***ing narcissist.’
‘Why are you doing this to me?’ the victim asked as tears streamed down his face.
Dadd-Zammit said she could do ‘whatever she wanted and get away with it’.
‘And the funny thing is, no one will believe you,’ Dadd-Zammit said, per the court documents, before she left the bedroom and resumed drinking the wine she had opened earlier.
The victim recalled he ‘didn’t want to escalate the situation given that there were knives in the kitchen near where [Dadd-Zammit] was sitting’.
Dadd-Zammit, who pleaded guilty to assault, eventually returned to bed and passed out by about 5.45am. The victim remained awake for a short time in ‘shock’.
Later in the morning, he woke before Dadd-Zammit and messaged a female friend to say that he had a ‘huuuge problem’.
The victim spoke to his friend on the phone about Dadd-Zammit and explained that he was too scared to ask her to leave.
He called triple-0 and reported that he was scared of Dadd-Zammit who allegedly had expressed an intention to ‘bury’ him.
The victim told police that Dadd-Zammit had allegedly ‘threatened to ruin his life’ and also threatened suicide.
While proceeding to the victim’s address, police observed his vehicle driving erratically behind them. They pulled over and spoke to him. Visibly distressed, he gave them his house keys and his permission to enter his residence.
Police found Dadd-Zammit asleep and naked in the bed.
Dadd-Zammit told police the victim had ended their relationship and ‘wondered aloud if she had had sex the previous night’, according to court documents.
She blamed the ‘phone contact’ with ‘Anton’, claiming the alias had hacked her Gmail.
Dadd-Zammit left the house without incident before the victim’s friend arrived and told him it was safe to return home.
The victim later broke down crying as he described what Dadd-Zammit did to him.
The corrections worker was taken to hospital before returning to live with his mother, who said her son was ‘often alone in his room crying’.
Sex crime detectives raided Dadd-Zammit’s Craigieburn home on October 8, 2024, and seized two mobile phones.
Investigators discovered messages Dadd-Zammit sent to the victim after he reported her to police.
These messages included vile references he was a ‘c***’, ‘weak’, and ‘to [sic] gutless to do the dirty work’.
Dadd-Zammit would later tell police that she met the victim on Tinder, they went on a date and she cleaned his home the next day as a ‘nice gesture’.
She claimed she ‘spiralled’ and drank heavily after not hearing from the victim for a ‘day or two’.
Regarding the assault, Dadd-Zammit claimed to only remember talking at the victim’s dining table before waking up ‘with the police in the house’.
Dadd-Zammit also admitted using the Snapchat handle ‘chickenhead’ to communicate with the victim, who she claimed left her ‘disappointed and hurt’ because he rejected her.
She also claimed she had ‘been vulnerable with him’ while also mentioning to police a ‘diagnosis of borderline personality disorder’ that made her ‘disassociate’.
Dadd-Zammit initially denied the sexual offending and tried to claim that ‘Anton’ was an ex-boyfriend rather than an online alias of hers.
Dadd-Zammit – who lives in Craigieburn, in Melbourne’s outer northwest, and was a Crown Casino employee – had her bail extended for a pre-sentence hearing on September 7.
