Twenty-nine-year-old former NSW Police constable Vaughan Mark Hildebrand has pleaded guilty to 44 offences against a dozen women, including intimidation, stalking, harassment, using a carriage service to solicit child pornography, and 17 counts of rape.
The women he terrorised included five serving police officers – his colleagues. Some of his victims are so traumatised that they’ve moved interstate in order to avoid him. Initially three women came forward to accuse Hildebrand of serious sexual allegations in mid-2017; nine more alleged victims then came forward in late-2017 to accuse him of sexual assault and rape.
Hildebrand used his position as a police officer to harass and blackmail his victims, using restricted police data and a number of social media accounts and burner phones. He also once posed as a plastic surgeon in order to obtain images of a woman’s breasts.
In two cases he acquired photos of his victims’ breasts, and used them to blackmail them into sending more explicit images. He told women that he would publish the images he already had, in one case threatening to contact a woman’s partner with them.
Hildebrand was employed at Sydney City Police Area Command from December 2011 to January 2017, when he was suspended after accessing restricted data on a police computer. He only resigned from the NSW Police Force in October, despite having been in custody since his arrest in June. He has been refused bail twice.
Sixty-eight charges in total were laid against him, and police say they believe more victims may come forward, increasing that number. He will be sentenced in February next year.
Source: Daily TelegraphImage: YouTube
