How a True-Crime Podcast Delayed a Victorian Trial by 10 Months
William 'Rob' Gilfillan's Victorian sex-offence trial was delayed by 10 months because of The Australian's Shadow of Doubt podcast, court documents show. The Guardian The papers were reported on 11 October 2026.
Gilfillan is a former physical education teacher already serving a 48-year jail term for abusing his daughter. He was due to stand trial in Victoria on five counts of indecent assault and sexual penetration of a person under 16. The charges related to two schoolgirls in his care in Gippsland in the 1980s.
Shadow of Doubt launched in March 2023. It claimed Gilfillan's 2016 conviction for rape and torture of his daughter may have been a grave miscarriage of justice. The Australian continues to maintain a dedicated Shadow of Doubt topic page, describing the series as its hit podcast available wherever podcasts are obtained. The Australian
Part of the series examined how allegations came to be made in the earlier case. A former boyfriend told the podcast that the couple's daughter may have learned about her father's past from a police officer. The Australian
Defence barrister Paul Kounnas applied for a permanent stay, a request to stop the case for good. He argued prejudice from the podcast was "immediate and obvious". He told the court Shadow of Doubt is the first link that comes up when typing the accused's name into Google, even though Gilfillan is not identified by name in the podcast.
Justice Michael O'Connell denied a permanent stay. He delayed jury selection until 1 December 2025. He ordered the Director of Public Prosecutions, the state office that brings criminal cases, to attempt to remove prejudicial material from the internet before trial.
When the trial went ahead in December, the jury found Gilfillan guilty of forcible sexual crimes.
The broader context here is the failure of anonymisation in a search environment. A decision not to name a subject in audio does not contain the story. Transcripts, show notes and secondary coverage do the naming work. Courts face a narrow choice. Stop the case forever, or buy time and try to scrub the record.
Looking at what this means for publishers, delay has become the price of contested true-crime investigation. A stay was refused. A conviction followed. That sequence will reassure prosecutors that prejudice can be cured by time and direction. It will not reassure editors. Ten months is a long interruption. An order that the state attempt to pull back published journalism is an awkward remedy. It places the DPP between fair-trial duties and press freedom, with no power to guarantee compliance from platforms or publishers.
