Five days after my husband confessed to his affair, police knocked at the door… His real secret was more shameful than I could have ever imagined

Three years before my life completely unravelled, I found a photo of a pair of breasts on my husband Adam’s phone.

It wasn’t a picture of some porn star taken off the internet. I knew these were a real woman’s breasts and the candid intimacy of the photo shocked me.

Of course, I confronted Adam*. But he explained it away by insisting a male friend had shared it and that it had been automatically downloaded to his camera roll.

Yet, ever since that day, I had a niggling sense that something wasn’t right. Call it a woman’s intuition, a wife’s sixth sense.

But nothing, absolutely nothing, could have prepared me for my husband’s darkest secret – a crime so awful, that when he was convicted, a magistrate would use the word ‘evil’ to describe it. 

His offence – possessing and transmitting child abuse material – was so disturbing he would ultimately spend 15 months in prison, depriving our two young children of a father at a crucial time in their lives.

His warped actions resulted in family and friends abandoning us. I don’t blame them.

But unlike those who walked away, as his wife and a psychologist, I tried to understand what Adam had done and was ultimately able to forgive him. I took him back.

The affair

It was mid-2021, as Victoria was gripped by yet another Covid lockdown, when things came to a head. 

Adam and I had been married for 15 years but he started behaving very secretively around his phone. I didn’t know his passwords, whereas he knew all of mine.

If I ever mentioned any insecurities he would gaslight me and make it sound like I was a worrier, that I was the anxious one and it was all in my head. 

But I knew in my gut something was wrong. I told him: ‘I don’t feel I can trust you unless you give me your phone and let me go through it right now.’

Adam looked down at his feet and didn’t move, didn’t say a word. It was clear from the look of utter guilt on his face that he knew this was a make-or-break moment in our marriage.

After what seemed like an eternity, he reluctantly told me his password and I started going through his phone. 

The whole photo library was filled with pictures of penises.

A woman knows her husband’s penis. And I knew immediately they weren’t Adam’s. 

I threw the phone at him and said, “Why the f*** are there penises all over your phone?”

There ensued a stupid, childish scene of me chasing him around the garden while he ran in circles attempting to delete evidence from his phone right under my nose.

Upset, I fled the house in my car but screeched to a halt two streets away. 

This is the breasts incident again, I thought. He can say they are just photos, but I need proof to confirm my suspicions, to prove I’m not going mad.

So I drove back home, snuck in and took his phone from the hallway table while he played in the back garden with our kids.

I parked a street away and for the next two hours went through his phone from top to bottom. Or so I thought.

Adam had always been close with my cousin Chris. They were best mates, often describing themselves as ‘brothers from other mothers’. 

They would tell each other everything. So I knew that if Adam had been having an affair, he would have told Chris.

But nothing could have prepared me for what I found when I checked their Facebook Messenger chats.

Adam had been having full-blown, drug-fuelled sex sessions with Chris and his wife. The three of them. There were videos and photos to prove it.

It would later emerge Adam had been sleeping with them on-and-off during our marriage.

The horror of the discovery barely registered. I have this weird way of remaining calm enough to be calculated even when faced with significant stress. 

It was fight-or-flight and I chose to fight. My first reaction was to protect myself and our kids by making sure we wouldn’t lose the house, to secure our financial future.

I formulated a plan and returned to the house. When I saw Adam’s face it was clear he knew that I knew and he tried to apologise.

He begged: ‘Can we talk about it? Can we work this out?’

That day, all four of us – our two kids, then aged seven and ten, myself and Adam – were meant to be going to a family friend’s birthday party.

I told him he was taking the kids to the party because they needed normalcy but he said he couldn’t face seeing other people. 

‘You need to f***ing man up because the kids need this, so you’re doing it and I’m going,’ I told him.

I wanted to kick him out of the family home but it eventually made more sense for me to move to my uncle’s place because Adam worked locally.

I told him he could stay at our home for a month but made him put in writing that the house was ours, the money was ours – everything was ours – and he was to leave. 

He agreed and was remorseful and accepting. He wanted to do anything he could to make up for what he had done.

At the time, I was studying for my masters degree in psychology. But I could hardly read a sentence. I was just running on adrenaline, shaking constantly. I wasn’t sleeping. 

Little did I know then, the nightmare hadn’t even started.  

The phone call 

Five days after my marriage had been blown apart, I awoke shortly before 7am to a blizzard of missed phone calls.

I listened to a voicemail left by a senior constable within the child exploitation team of the Australian Federal Police (AFP). 

With trembling hands I rang them back. They told me they were at my family home, interviewing Adam and they were planning to charge him. Could I come back to look after my children?

I got off the phone and collapsed. 

I would later learn that the AFP – the law enforcement agency in Australia that handles cybercrime and child abuse material – had been monitoring Adam’s online activity for some time.

He had been fixated about abusing toddlers with strangers on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app.

I had scoured Adam’s phone and thought I had found the worst thing imaginable when I discovered his three-way affair. But I was wrong.

When the AFP raided my family home at dawn, they discovered Adam had a hidden folder on his phone that I had missed containing almost 800 images of mostly young boys – some as young as two – being sexually abused.

These men are experts at hiding things and although I’d searched right through his phone, I hadn’t found the hidden folder he kept these horrifying images. 

He was also part of a group chat called ‘Kindergarten’, where he would respond to images and videos of children being bound, gagged and abused by adults with comments like ‘mmmm hot’.

In that moment, a terrible thought entered my mind: had Adam abused our own children?

It know it sounds crazy, but I knew him well enough to say with confidence that it wasn’t in his nature to touch a child or to do anything like that towards our children.

I could understand – but obviously never accept – him looking at online content or talking about these things. But I also knew he wouldn’t physically hurt a child in real life.

Let’s be clear: sharing photos is still hurting children. He has hurt children and he has abused them by doing so.

But from a psychology perspective, it’s also very rare for offenders to actually touch their own children. The paternal instinct or something overrides that, weirdly enough. 

But all this reasoning came later. In the moment, as I was processing what was going on, all I could think about was my children’s wellbeing. 

My son was away at a school camp but my daughter was at home and I was terrified having the police raid raiding our home at dawn would traumatise her for life. 

I pulled myself together and drove the hour-and-a-half back home. 

When I arrived, the constable wouldn’t even let me use the bathroom in my own home because there were concerns I might interfere with the questioning process or that Adam and I might be conspiring.

They eventually escorted me to the toilet and waited outside the door. 

The house was absolutely trashed. It was like a homeless person had gone in and ransacked the place looking for money for drugs. Drawers were upended, clothes were strewn everywhere. 

They had torn the mattress off my son’s bunk bed, obviously looking for evidence of any kind of abuse towards my children.

This is by no means everyone’s experience, but the officers who were there on the day were thankfully very good with my daughter. 

She was showing one of the constables the teddies in her room while they interviewed Adam in the kitchen.

He looked so defeated, so solemn. The police said a lot of men are very dismissive or defensive and try to deny their guilt, but Adam was filled with remorse.

I think, to a certain extent, he was relieved to be caught. 

If men are having these obsessive-compulsive intrusive thoughts then there’s no real safe place for them to go for help.

It’s a mental illness and they need help in order to keep our children safe. 

As they were leading him away to the police station, they asked me if there was anything I wanted to say to him.

I had nothing to say. I simply told him to give our house key back. 

The trial 

Adam was kept in custody that afternoon and released on bail to his mother’s house.

His bail conditions meant he was not allowed to see or speak to us until child protection services had come out and done an assessment.

But it’s such a bad system, it takes them forever. Child protection caused as much, if not more, trauma than the whole ordeal itself.

It took them six weeks to get in touch: six weeks of not knowing what to tell our children about the reason their father had just disappeared. 

My son was traumatised and it has taken him years to get past it.  

When child protection did finally get involved, they questioned my parenting and asked me the most intrusive questions about our sex life. 

One child protection worker even insisted that I should tell my children everything their father had done because they needed to keep themselves safe.

They seriously suggested I tell my kids their father was a paedophile, that he had been downloading abuse images of children and that was why he couldn’t see them.

As a psychologist, I knew straight away I wouldn’t be telling my children that because that would do more harm than good. What about the ongoing psychological damage?

Another condition of Adam’s bail was a ban on accessing the internet. 

But police later discovered he had been searching for more child abuse material on Snapchat, Reddit, Telegram and Google while he was awaiting trial.

I think to a certain extent that was because he knew he wasn’t coping. He was almost at breaking point and thinking of suicide, unable to imagine living without his kids.

I suspect he wanted to be caught and having his bail revoked would make it easier for him to avoid those kinds of temptations behind bars.

The trial was delayed three times. Thankfully, a letter I wrote to the court meant Adam’s identity was suppressed for the protection of our children, sparing us the indignity of a media onslaught.

He pleaded guilty to everything. But the system is so screwed.

Adam deserved to be punished but he was allowed to serve his sentences concurrently. If he had to serve them consecutively, he would have got six-and-a-half years – and he deserved every single day.

But instead he was out within 15 months.

There was none of what they call ‘first gen’ stuff – meaning he had not engaged in the actual production of photos or videos, nor had he touched any children himself. 

It was all sharing, which is obviously just as bad. Consuming and distributing child abuse material feeds the spider’s web of predators.

What I have come to realise is that every image of child abuse is a crime scene. It’s not a passive activity: anyone who consumes child abuse material is creating a demand for children to be raped. 

At his sentencing, the judge said Adam’s messages with other paedophiles had made for extremely ‘disturbing reading’.  

‘This offending is repugnant,’ she told him.

‘People like you allow for the proliferation of the evil child abuse industry.’

I had been furious when I heard he had breached his bail and I vowed I would never speak to him or let him see our children again.

Indeed, I never visited him in Hopkins Correctional Centre – a medium security men’s prison about 200km (120 miles) west of Melbourne – and filed for divorce. I couldn’t cope with the stigma of child protection being involved and losing all my friends and family.

But over the course of his incarceration I realised the children needed some sort of contact with their father.

They were worrying about how he would be treated in prison. We decided they could write an email a month and I assisted so I knew exactly what was being said.

The forgiveness 

I have been asked many times how I could ever take Adam back. It’s a question I’ve often asked myself. 

We had a very close friend pass away recently who was always really supportive and understanding of both our sides.

Over the last 12 months, my brothers and my father have stopped speaking to me. As have many friends.

The family I was worried about losing, where are they now? They’ve gone. Because they couldn’t hack sticking around for the trauma, they couldn’t understand what I was going through.

But then the friend who did understand has gone. His death made me look really closely at what’s important.

It’s not just that Adam is the father of my kids. He’s my person. 

We actually communicate far better now than we ever had before. We are so open with each other about absolutely everything.

I know his deepest, darkest secret. How many wives can truly say that about their husbands?

When he did get out of jail and resumed his involvement in the children’s lives, I saw he had been doing a lot of work on himself.

He has learnt how important it is to engage in good self-care, not to drink too much, to be responsible and look after his mental health. 

He works out regularly and is connected with the LGBTQI community, exploring his sexuality in a healthy way that we can be proud of together.  

I began to understand what had led him to such a bad space, including the fact he had been abused himself as a child.

It was all that internalised homophobia, not accepting his own sexuality, which had partly led him down this dark path.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that being abused or being confused about your sexuality excuses or explains such behaviour.

Indeed, the research is clear: most victims of child sexual abuse are men and most victims never go on to offend themselves. 

Nor is there any link between Queer sexualities and child abuse, as many on the right would maliciously have you believe. 

In fact, research shows that the biggest percentage of child sex offenders are straight adult men. 

The grim truth is that it is far, far more common than any of us would like to acknowledge.

Last year, the University of Sydney published the world’s largest child sexual abuse perpetration prevalence study.

Shockingly, it found that one in five Australian men reported sexual feelings towards children and/or have sexually offended against children.

Think of five men you know – maybe your brother, father, uncle, work colleagues, friends – and then consider that one of them could be guilty.

It’s not a nice thought. But it’s one we need to confront as a society if we are to root out child abuse in all its evil forms.

During the first meeting I had with Adam after his release he was wearing a bracelet he had made himself which was pink lace through black leather.

He was dressing more feminine, embracing the fact he is a bisexual man. He has since come out to his family and is more comfortable in who he is as a person.

To this day, I check in with him regularly about whether he has had any sinister thoughts or feelings. 

I tell him: ‘I won’t leave you if you tell me you’ve got these intrusive thoughts or compulsions coming back. 

‘I’m going to leave you if you cheat on me or you break the law. But if you tell me that you’re struggling or you need help with your mental health then I’m here.’

And I know that for so many people a relationship like this wouldn’t work and they wouldn’t be able to look past his conviction. 

But if anyone can get past it, we can.

Beyond all of that, if you ignore his crimes, Adam is an amazing dad.

He’s just amazingly f****d up as well. But he’s very passionate about working hard to make up for that.

I have lost friends because they haven’t been able to understand my decision to forgive. This loss has often made me feel very isolated without anyone to talk to.

In my loneliness, I found an organisation called PartnerSpeak, which offers support to non-offending partners and family of perpetrators of child sexual abuse.

It has been really helpful to hear from other women in my situation because it is something that no one can understand until you’ve gone through it.

You agonise over whether to stay or leave, agonising over the struggle to reconcile your partner’s disgusting, reprehensible actions with the person you know and love. 

As a family we have had to relocate to get a fresh start because the stigma was just too much being in a small town. Our old home was also a constant reminder for the children of the trauma that followed for years after that awful morning the police came. 

A psychologist once described it to me as essentially being stuck in an unresolved grief process because there’s constantly more milestones for the children and more things to grieve. 

Adam now lives an hour away, sleeping on a sofa in his dad’s place, and we only see each other about once a week. The kids are happy with the arrangement. They’re thankful to have him back in whatever capacity. 

My daughter is a bit younger and doesn’t really know anything about the things her father has done, whereas my son is older and knows pretty much everything.

Both kids are very well-educated in online safety, consent and privacy in general.  

Adam is not working, he’s not driving: it’s so hard for him to get back on his feet after being in jail and now being on the sex offenders register. He’s still doing his time in that way – and so he should. 

But I had lunch with a girlfriend the other week who hasn’t seen a cent of child support from her ex-husband in 12 months and she’s struggling to put food on the table. 

Yet my husband – who is sleeping on his dad’s couch, doesn’t have a job and is struggling to pay his bills – has agreed to pay for anything related to our children, whether it be recreational activities, their school fees and uniforms. 

He no longer cares if he is able to keep a roof over his own head; he simply wants to provide for us.

Until this happened to me, I absolutely would have had a similar attitude towards paedophiles: name and shame them, lock them up, never speak to them again.

After all, they have committed some of the most heinous crimes, they shouldn’t be allowed back into society, they shouldn’t be able to get a job, and they should have to pay for their crimes for the rest of their life.

But this is what people forget: paedophiles aren’t just lonely basement-dwellers; many of them have families. They have children, mothers, wives – many of whom choose not to stick around.

Their crimes, arrests and convictions have a devastating ripple effect on their families, and on their children in particular.

An overwhelming body of evidence suggests that children who don’t have a father in their lives suffer as adults. 

We had already been through so much, and I didn’t want the cycle of misery to continue. That is why I took my person back.

*Names have been changed for legal reasons. As told to Max Aitchison