Network Ten newsreader Sandra Sully has opened up about the terrifying moment she was attacked by a masked man and had a gun pointed to her head.
The horrifying incident occurred in 1997, and now on the 20th anniversary of the attack, she reveals she’s lived in fear ever since.
As she returned home one night after midnight, her attacker wrestled her to the ground in the car park of her apartment. The man, who was wearing a balaclava, grabbed her hair but Sandra kept fighting, she explained to Stellar magazine.
The man pulled the trigger as he pointed a gun at her temple, but miraculously, it didn’t go off. He began hitting her face with the gun but she kept screaming. She remembers laying there thinking: “Bloody hell, I am going to die. I am going to die on the floor of a car park. This is it.”‘
“He was aware he couldn’t shut me up,” she told Stellar. “I kept fighting and, at some point, he just decided he had to run.”
Her attacker fled and pulled off his balaclava as he ran. Sandra remembers a blonde, muscular man – a face she kept searching for in crowds for years later. The man has still never been caught, and it’s something that stays with her constantly.
“If someone makes a loud noise, I jump. I am always aware in a car park. You realise life can be snuffed out in an instant,” the TV veteran explains.
For 10 years following the attack, Sandra had ex-federal police officers go running with her because she feared being out alone.
But now, 20 years on, she won’t let that horrible moment define her. “The assault helped me define where my barriers were,” Sandra says. “I don’t chase publicity for publicity’s sake. Sometimes I think that’s probably hurt me, but it doesn’t fulfil me. I’ve seen the ugly side of that. No regrets. It’s made me a lot stronger.”
