Tom Silvagni sentencing: not Xavier College but DPP and social media to blame
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
After the recent abuse judgment, today we will find out about Tom Silvagni's sentence. Dad died shortly after his employer, the late Cardinal Pell, was sentenced to prison. The cardinal was subsequently acquitted in his appeal to the High Court. Dad was a Carlton supporter. He would be turning in his grave at the thought that Stephen Silvagni's son could be a rapist.
Suppression orders were lifted last week and the media have finally identified Tom Silvagni as the latest Australian football personality to be convicted of abuse.
News reports were quick to comment on the fact the Silvagni brothers all attended Xavier College, the elite Catholic boys school attended by my father and I. As explained in a previous blog, after moving from Bendigo to Melbourne for my final year of school, I used to cycle from Pentridge Prison to Xavier College each day while Tom really is in prison for at least one Christmas and maybe more.
The alleged incident took place in January 2024. That appears to be four years after Tom completed year 12. References to the school are therefore not helpful in any specific way. In a general sense, all we can say is there is a correlation between wealth and abuse, just as there is a correlation between wealth and attendance at elite schools. But correlation is not causation. The Chanel Contos "petition" about consent demonstrated that incidents of this nature were alleged to happen in every elite school of every denomination. The Federal Court published the Katharine Thornton Dossier about their former boss, the attorney general Christian Porter. In his case, it is alleged that abuse took place while he was representing another elite school at the national debating contest. An allegation against a student on an official school trip is far more severe than an allegation against a former student.
Silvagni background
Tom had started a job as a player agent at Kapital Sports Management shortly before the incident. The Wayback machine has captured images of Tom with his colleagues as well as his profile:
Tom is a recently accredited AFL Player Agent and works closely with our team of experienced agents at the ground level. Tom has “lived” the industry through his family ties and is a great resource to Kapital given he has recently experienced playing in AFL pathways. Tom offers great perspective to the young draftees as they navigate the system and is a great relationship piece with our draft talent.
Polarizing and adversarial procedures are not solving abuse
After the conviction was announced, the victim was invited to make a unilateral victim impact statement. She used much of that opportunity to direct her comments against Tom. She made little reference to anybody else at the party and no reference to the cultural and legal problems around abuse in Australia.
Shiannon Corcoron writes a strongly man-hating piece about the trial:
was about how the rights of the wealthy and powerful can override the rights of the small, the weak, the vulnerable and the truth. This man-child ...
As the accuser is anonymous, we do not know if she was small or weak. The facts do confirm she was vulnerable at that particular moment in time: she had gone to sleep in a bed with another man. She believed he would stay the night. The other man left at 2am, leaving the complainant alone and vulnerable.
The polarizing nature of these comments can be further exposed with reference to a parallel case in the United Kingdom. On the same day as the judgment in Melbourne, a British police officer failed in their appeal to overturn dismissal for gross misconduct. In the British case, the attacker was not a male police officer, it was a female police officer, PC Pamela Pritchard. While the police sacked her, there is no mention of any criminal prosecution for her actions.
Look at the women running around the world of open source software encouraging people to gang up on each other.
Comments like that are incredibly dangerous. In the world of football, Tom may have seen the way the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) handled the case against Stephen Milne and he may have felt that a yes to one man is almost as good as a yes to both men.
Abuse is not about the offender's gender. It is about power, having a gang on your side or just being incredibly drunk and stupid.
There are at least two sides to every story. Looking at the falsified harassment claims in the world of open source software, I was able to find internal emails manipulating journalists to repeat false accusations against Dr Jacob Appelbaum. If somebody was really abused, why did they try to fight their battle through B-grade journalists rather than going directly to the police?
One of the more notable examples in Australia was the wrongful persecution of Alex Matters from the ALP. Sky News conducted an excellent interview with Mr Matters about what it is like to be wrongly accused of abuse.
Based on these cases, I feel it is wise to be very cautious when somebody raises an accusation. It is important to listen and write down evidence but it is foolish to repeat an accusation willy-nilly on social control media.
The mental health defence
Silvagni's lawyers argued that due to the high profile of his family and his young age, he would be at unreasonable risk of self-harm or suicide if the story of the trial was published by the media. On this basis, the entire trial was conducted in secret and his identity only revealed after he was convicted.
There have been vast discussions about privacy, censorship and the credibility of mental health concerns.
Research into the mental health issue suggests that everybody in proximity to bullying and persecution, including family members, team mates, Carlton fans, friends of Tom's mum and Xavier alumni are going to collectively suffer some stress due to the public denunciation of the Silvagni family.
Take a moment to think about Tom's brothers and their families.
Ben was dating Eve Markoski-Wood. Eve's biological father, inconveniently named Rapoff, was convicted and jailed on drug offences. Eve's mother is a reality TV star and Eve uses the name of her step-father. It looks like Eve broke off the relationship with Ben shortly after the charges were officially declared. Britain's Daily Mail tabloid speculated that the "tyranny of distance" had forced them apart but now we know the real reason.
Jack had a very successful few years playing for Carlton. He arrived in the club at the same time as Grace Phillips took up a role as a social media intern. Grace was fortunate to strike up a relationship with her new colleague, the star recruit and son of one of the club legends. They married in 2023 and not long after, in 2024 they had a baby son, Charlie. How is the child going to feel when it arrives for its first day at school and some other five year old asks about uncle Tom?
Tom's girlfriend, Alannah Iocanis, who was a friend of the accuser, is also one of these influencer/model personalities in the world of social control media. With her boyfriend in jail, will other celebrities be willing to date her? Will she be able to maintain the influencer/model lifestyle or will she have to get a job in a supermarket or coffee shop?
Alannah was chosen as a finalist in Miss Universe Australia 2025 even while her boyfriend was on trial for rape. Many pages about her participation have vanished as news got around.
Alannah's model agency, KHOO, has removed her profile.
Media is self-censoring even after suppression order lifted
Many of the media reports do not mention the names of the other people attending the party. It is vital to understand that Anthony LoGuidice, the other man who had been in the room with the girl was a close relative of the Carlton football club president, Mark LoGuidice. At the same time, it is important to understand that Tom's father, one of the legends of Carlton, had been refusing to speak to Mark LoGuidice for a number of years.
When the reader is aware of all these challenging relationships, they can begin to contemplate the possibility that people have had a role in manipulating the girl or manipulating Tom or manipulating both of them to create a crisis.
Tom's girlfriend, Alannah Iocanis, had invited the victim to the four-way party and she arrived after midnight. Tom's best friend was having an open relationship with the victim. Think of the film Cruel Intentions from 1999. It remains a masterpiece of this genre.
The role of technology
Within minutes of the alleged abuse, the victim had used her mobile phone to alert multiple people that she was an abuse victim. Being only nineteen years old, she may not have realized the extent to which these text messages would change her life. The identities of abuse victims can't be published by the press in Australia, nonetheless, her name has been shared widely between people in her circle of friends, people she thought she could trust and the football clubs concerned.
Without a mobile phone, she may have had time to think about her response to the situation. Once she had gone down the path of telling multiple people, she was unable to turn back.
Deception and rape go together, from Chateau Silvagni to the FSFE & Debian lies
News reports were quick to emphasize that Tom is accused of using deception to gain access to the sleeping nineteen year old. He has admitted using deception, a falsified Uber receipt, to obfuscate the identities of those really in the house at the time of the alleged abuse.
I suspect many people would feel a sense of shock if accused of abuse and some may be tempted to put up barriers to protect themselves. The trial of Tom Silvagni found that his response was not merely a spontaneous lie made up on the spur of the moment, it was a co-ordinated deception involving at least one other person and a forged document.
During the nearly 10-day trial, Crown prosecutor Jeremy McWilliams told jurors the rapes were committed 'not through threats, not through force… but through deception,' with Silvagni impersonating his friend to trick the woman.
In Debianism, the former leader sent this email in December 2018:
You are well-aware that I have been nothing but scrupulous and gentlemanly with regards to your personal privacy and thus I would refuse to cite any outside or otherwise offer any objective rebuttals to your claims on a public forum.
Yet records show he had spent much of 2018 sending defamatory emails behind my back at a time when I lost two family members. Nothing could be a more hideous violation of privacy.
We've seen similar extremes as Matthias Kirschner uses the name FSFE to impersonate the real FSF in Boston. In a previous blog, I compared the FSFE to a Nigerian 911 scam.
Tom Silvagni is accused of using deception/impersonation to procure sex with one of his best friend's girlfriends. Chris Lamb and Matthias Kirschner used deception on a similar scale to procure victims' work while pretending to be independent voluntary organizations. In the latter case, we saw victims killed themselves in the Debian suicide cluster. One victim died on our wedding day. █