She filled up her petrol tank, in case she was chased all the way home to Sydney’s northern beaches from the Old Bar Bowling Club on the NSW Mid North Coast.

The 23-year-old had told a couple of colleagues the day before that if she wasn’t at work on Monday they should call the police. When her family went down to the beach that morning, she stayed back and took their set of keys to her apartment. When they came back, she suggested to her stepfather that they should catch up over lunch at the local bowling club.

James Kontaxis had shattered what should have been an idyllic childhood for Rebecca, who grew up a few streets back from the beach in the coastal hamlet of Old Bar. He sexually abused her for more than two years from the age of 12. It started with kissing and touching and ended in countless rapes.

A youth worker for the then Department of Community Services and Juvenile Justice, vice president of the Taree PCYC, foster parent, surfing teacher, touch football referee and active church member, Kontaxis was seemingly loved by everybody. He was the popular and charismatic bohemian, with a beautiful African-born wife.

But in the 10 years that Rebecca had kept his sordid secret, her life had disintegrated. She had nothing left to do but confront him.

As they arrived at the Old Bar Bowling Club, she made sure Kontaxis said hello to the many people he knew, just to make sure he couldn’t later make a scene.

She chose a table beneath a security camera, should he try to threaten her with violence.

She ordered chicken schnitzel and asked for a steak knife. She left her handbag slightly open, with her phone near the top, just as she’d practiced the day before. Then, as they finished their meals, she discretely hit ‘record’.

‘I’ve got a bone to pick with you,’ she began.

Over the next 20 minutes, Rebecca asked her father why he had abused her; a young, defenceless girl.

He admitted to it but had no explanation for her. He said he was sorry but he didn’t appear remorseful. He said she had a lot of nerve, deciding to come out with this at the same time her mother was battling breast cancer. He told her he was done talking about it and wanted to leave.

Rebecca gave him an ultimatum. She asked for a huge sum of money - a demand she knew was unrealistic - or else she would go to the police in seven days. She told him she was recording the conversation. Tick, tock, she said. And then she left.

‘It was really exhilarating ... it was scary but, as I was driving home, I was actually laughing,’ says Rebecca, now 25. ‘I had never seen him so petrified. I saw a look in his eyes that he probably saw in mine more than once.’

When Rebecca’s mother left her violent partner in the mid-1990s, she sought solace in the Seventh Day Adventist Church in Auburn. There she met a vegetarian, guitar-playing surfer who didn’t smoke, didn’t drink and was incredibly popular in the church.

James Kontaxis emerged as her white knight and the new couple soon moved to a property near the beach on the Mid North Coast.

As Rebecca looks through childhood photos, she reflects on how happy she was. Playing outside her grandparents’ Parramatta home as a three-year-old, about the time her mother met Kontaxis, she is smiling in the sun.

But another photo of the family sitting around the kitchen table about 2002 tells a different story.

In 2003, when Rebecca was 12, Kontaxis lost his job with DOCS. The cause is unclear but he would later tell a court-appointed psychologist that he spiralled into drinking and smoking and ‘wasn’t in the right frame of mind’.

He started hugging Rebecca for longer, kissing her with his tongue, touching her backside. As his drinking increased, so did the touching. On a trip to his parents’ house in Auburn in the summer holidays, he raped Rebecca digitally and forced her to masturbate him. He told her it was a normal part of growing up and that if she said anything to her mother it would destroy the family.

‘I was shocked, confused, in denial and just completely dumbfounded,’ she says. ‘It was wrong and I knew it. It felt disgusting.’

This abuse lasted for months. In late 2003, it escalated. It would later take Rebecca several weeks, several bottles of wine and an emotional breakdown to write a 12-page victim impact statement detailing what he did to her.

‘I can barely bring myself to type the words because of the shame and anger I feel,’ she wrote. ‘I feel dirty and worthless. I feel numbness and a reckless indifference to anything ... I got through by shutting down mentally, socially, spiritually, intellectually and, to some extent, sexually.’

During a 2004 school term, Kontaxis took Rebecca to a family farm near Ballina where they stayed in a caravan for 10 days. Most nights he would drink at the Woodburn Hotel and when they went home to bed, he would rape her.

Police would later corroborate this through key events from the trip such as Rebecca’s phone call to her mother, in which she cried and said she wanted to come home, and a trip to the local pharmacy to buy a cream for her soreness.

When she returned to school, she told her classmates she had been at Dreamworld and Movie World. ‘Something profound changed within me at this point,’ she says. ‘I shut down completely.’

Rebecca became a troublesome teen. She spent as much time in sick bay as she could. She drank and became promiscuous. She ostracised herself, confiding to just one friend that she’d been raped. That friend didn’t believe her.

When she was 14, she ran away to her grandparents in Sydney and ended up in hospital with appendicitis. She told a hospital social worker that Kontaxis was physically abusive but that disclosure was relayed to her stepfather and, when she returned home a month later, Kontaxis allegedly gave her the beating of her life.

Then, without any explanation, the abuse stopped.

Rebecca left home the day after her HSC, confident that she’d leave her problems there too, but by late 2014 everything was a mess.

Her drinking was extreme, she had mounting debts, a promotion she had worked hard for at a superannuation administration firm went down the drain due to a take-over, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and her four-year relationship had collapsed - yet another victim of her shattered sense of intimacy and self-confidence.

She was driving from the northern beaches to Old Bar every second weekend, buying food for the family and cleaning the house while Kontaxis seemingly wallowed in his wife’s illness. It made her angry to see him crying ‘poor me’ when her life was a wreck.

Her mother’s second mastectomy was the final straw, as Rebecca faced the prospect of her mother possibly dying without knowing the truth about the man she married.

‘I just said to myself, ‘OK, what have you got to lose?’’

Her demand for money was driven partly by desperate frustration at her own dire situation and partly by a desire to inflict maximum fear in Kontaxis. She asked for $30,000. He said there was no way he could pay it.

‘So that leaves me with no options,’ she said to him. ‘I get no pain, no gain; maybe then you get what’s coming to you.’

He told her she was only hurting her mother and family. ‘No, that’s why I’ve shut up for 11 years,’ she replied.

Confronting Kontaxis felt like diving into a cold pool after years spent in a burning hell. But it would be short lived. Perhaps naively, she thought her family would rally around her.

Her mother, who doesn’t work, initially said she would leave her husband but gradually her conviction faded. After months of what appeared to be preparations to leave him, her mother’s act fell apart when Rebecca picked up her mother’s phone to find a text she’d sent her husband, who was on bail, saying: ‘Good morning my Greek God, how are you feeling today?’.

On the day of his sentencing, she arrived at court holding his hand.

‘There are no words to describe what having your mother choose a paedophile over you feels like,’ Rebecca says.

Marg Liddell, a child abuse expert at RMIT University, says it is ‘extremely common’ for women to stay with their partners after revelations of child sex abuse surface.

‘Sometimes there’s a sense of ‘how did I not know? It can’t be true’ and ... it often challenges the mother’s mothering. Other times the structure of the family and the economic issues make it very hard to leave,’ she says. ‘It’s easy for us to say ‘she should leave’ but for most women the choices are so complex.’

Also common is the silencing of victims, particularly from abusers such as Kontaxis, who hold positions of power and trust. It’s estimated about 70 per cent of sexual assaults are never reported.

‘The children who are likely to delay reporting for many years are those who have a close familial relationship with the abuser,’ says University of NSW professor Anne Cossins, the country’s pre-eminent expert on sex abuse legal reform. ‘Often overt threats aren’t needed. The grooming strategy is such that the emotional bond will protect the abuser.’

Rebecca believes the only way to change this is to break down the stigma of abuse and mental illness, which is the reason why she has spoken out.

‘It’s such a taboo topic and I think that’s something that aides the perpetrators,’ she says. ‘This needs to be spoken about in schools to kids; teachers need to be openly aware. When this was going on for me, I had so many obvious behavioural problems.’

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is already having an impact and authorities have credited an increase in historic child abuse charges over the past three years to the commission’s high profile. But it disturbs Rebecca that it doesn’t cover familial abuse, considering this accounts for 94 per cent of abuse. More than one in 10 abusers are stepfathers.

‘Most of this happens within families where there is more at stake for the victim to report it,’ she says.

She was among the 26 per cent of court cases that result in a conviction. The secret recording, although obtained without consent, undoubtedly helped.

As did a team of experts she said were outstanding - patient and compassionate investigators Detective Senior Constable Eric Pollard and Detective Stacey Chalk, her DPP legal team, support workers, colleagues, friends and her partner.

Kontaxis, 60, was sentenced in the NSW District Court in September to eight years in prison.

He never gave an explanation for his behaviour, saying only to police ‘I knew I had done the wrong thing’ and ‘I wanted to make reparation’.

He told court-appointed psychologist Anne Lucas that it had weighed heavily on his mind but he never found the ‘right time’ to tell his wife. Lucas said he was at low risk of reoffending but his contrition appeared to be based on his own losses. He presented with significant levels of ‘victim-stancing’, she says.

On the day he was sentenced, Rebecca suddenly stopped having the vivid, traumatic nightmares that were a constant feature of her post-traumatic stress disorder. Sometimes they would result in her unwittingly punching her partner in their sleep. A couple of months after she confronted Kontaxis, she suddenly stopped the chronic nail biting she’d acquired in her teens.

The ongoing depression is still there, the bitterness of betrayal, the mourning for things lost, but so is the taste of joy and justice.

‘I said to a close friend a few weeks ago, ‘I am no longer dragging around an invisible anchor’.’

smh.com.au