Hello.
A lot of us have had the feeling when we've been shocked
or let down by somebody close to us, of wondering if we can ever
really know the people in our lives.
Few, though, have had an experience as shattering as
high school teacher Hannah Grundy.
Almost three years ago, her trust was obliterated
in the most disturbing way but she transformed her anger
into a pursuit for justice.
HANNAH: It's just hard to put into words, I guess,
what the last three years have been like.
It's been pretty awful and it's been pretty lonely.
What we went through, like, it just seemed so strange,
so weird that it would happen to us.
One second we were just ordinary people, and the next minute
everything just kind of blew up.
Just knowing that there was someone out there that was so fixated on me
and had spent so many hours thinking about me,
was just really terrifying.
I always thought I was a pretty good judge of character.
I guess I've had to question that quite a lot.
What has happened to us,
it makes you wonder who you can ever trust.
Whether you can ever really know someone.
MAN: This story really starts at a place called Manning Bar
about a decade ago.
It's the on-campus bar at Sydney Uni.
A lot of students would go there, have lunch, a couple of schooners,
um, and of a night there's often gigs.
And Manning Bar is where I met Hannah.
HANNAH: I was working there in the daytime at that point.
What I loved about it was that I made a lot of friends
from the bar that I wouldn't have made otherwise.
It was just a nice way to make friends.
Rachel and Jess and Kris and a couple of managers -
that was a very close-knit group for us.
We would do our shift, and then we would walk down King Street
and go and get a drink and go back to someone's house.
WOMAN: Manning Bar was a family.
We worked together, we partied together,
we went on holidays together.
That was pretty much our core social group for all of us.
We all pretty consistently stayed in touch after we all left.
HANNAH: After we left uni, Kris and I got on with our careers.
I became a high school science teacher and Kris works in finance.
No, probably not.
We've been together for a very long time now, so I think we're heading
on 13 years now, so we're just a pretty strong unit.
It's very hard to imagine now a Hannah without a Kris,
and a Kris without a Hannah.
They're very lucky to have each other
because they do work so well together.
HANNAH: A few years ago, Kris and I bought our first house together.
We furnished it.
I think when we bought the house, it felt like we'd finally kind of got
comfortable, got situated.
You know, we had the dogs.
I think it was a really nice time for us, during that period.
About a year after that, everything changed.
KRIS: Towards the end of 2021,
Hannah started getting emails from someone called John Doe,
which we initially ignored because they seemed very much like a scam.
Actually, the emails weren't a scam.
My name is Will. I live in New Zealand.
I was in the police for three years.
I'm a part-time private investigator
with a very specific focus on online activity or online intelligence.
Internet-enabled crime is massive.
It is quite a difficult space to operate in.
Therefore, I'm keeping my identity secret.
I was made aware of Hannah based on information that an ex-colleague
had given me about a particular website.
I contacted Hannah because I was concerned.
A couple of months after the John Doe email,
Hannah got an email from someone called Sally.
WILL: That was me as well.
I persisted in sending them emails
because I thought there was quite serious potential for harm.
HANNAH: What it said was, "This is really important,"
and then underneath it said, "Warning..."
And I'm paraphrasing,
"This link contains disturbing material."
And so that one had freaked me out a little bit.
KRIS: We discussed it. We thought it was probably still a scam,
but she wanted me to open the link, so I did.
HANNAH: He searched it,
and I'm just waiting at the door, like, looking in,
just wondering what's going on.
And he kind of just went white.
KRIS: I remember opening the link, looking at Hannah
and just saying, "Oh, fuck, it's real."
And there was just, like, photo after photo of me,
like, clearly porn images,
but then my face had been superimposed on the women in them.
I'll never forget how shocking, how scary it was to see me like that.
There was a poll at the top of the page where people were voting
on their preferred way of raping Hannah.
And there was hundreds and hundreds of votes.
I was just so scared, that my brain just said to keep me safe,
I cannot see any more of that website.
And I came into this room,
I came into the lounge room instead, and I shut down,
and Kris continued to go through it.
KRIS: On the photos there were Hannah's full name,
her middle name as well.
Um, said that she was from Sydney, gave out her Instagram handle.
It was all very easily identifiable information.
Soon after that, I saw some more explicit and direct threats.
I'd say it's probably the first time in my life
that I've ever had a panic attack.
Um, it was just incredibly shocking
and I didn't know what to do, and I felt very powerless.
WILL: The posts of Hannah were incredibly graphic in nature,
using AI technology to add things like bruising.
I thought it was so disturbing that someone had spent so much time
doing that to my images.
And it was very clear even from the beginning
that they were from my Facebook or my Instagram.
And I just...that was obviously...
Meant it was someone I knew.
It wasn't all just me. There was also other women posted.
KRIS: We saw photos of Rachel and Jess,
our friends from Manning Bar.
HANNAH: It was just really awful to see your friends like that.
I think it's one thing to see yourself,
but it's just something to see people that you love
on that website as well.
KRIS: We just kept going through all of the posts.
There was a few other people that we'd worked with at Manning,
so it became pretty obvious that there was some Manning
or hospitality connection there.
We were sort of thinking that it would be a patron,
someone that we didn't know particularly well.
You were looking through all of the women from that website,
and we were putting them into Facebook
and putting their names through,
and we were seeing the mutual friends we had.
It got... Progressively smaller.
Progressively smaller, until we got to...
How many names did we get to? About three?
Everything was pointing us very clearly in one direction,
and we just really didn't want that.
And it just became sort of more and more obvious
that it was our friend Andy.
HANNAH: When I started at Manning Bar, Andy was the bar supervisor.
He was someone that really cared about me, and I cared about him.
And I thought of him as a very good friend of mine.
I guess it was so shocking because Andy was someone we trusted
so much, and he's been to our house, we've been on holidays with him,
and a lot of the big moments of our life in the last 10 years
had been with him there as a very close friend.
So, I guess the shock of that was kind of so hard to bear.
There was never any risk or any worry about him.
No, probably the lowest-risk person...
..to spend time with, really.
Yeah.
I felt very betrayed by it.
How do you trust other people now,
when you've known someone for 10 years
and they can say that kind of stuff about you online.
I don't...I don't understand it. Yeah.
HANNAH: The next morning I called the police and they told me
that I should just come on in.
So I drove down there, and I had a Google Doc,
which was everything that we had kind of collated the night before,
ready to show them.
I gave the police about 600 screenshots or so
and gave them a spreadsheet that was sort of linking all the women
and posts on the website to Andy.
HANNAH: I knew that it wasn't gonna be enough evidence for them
to charge someone, but I thought it might be a good launch pad
or something for them to go on and investigate
and them to come to the same conclusion.
We really thought they'd be like, "Oh, good work."
KRIS: Our hope or expectation was that it would be
fairly easy to charge him.
It seemed like he'd done something illegal,
and we left thinking that the police didn't really share that view.
HANNAH: So, a few days after we went to the police,
we hadn't heard back anything about our concerns,
and so that's when we decided to approach a lawyer.
My name is Sidnie Sarang.
I've been a criminal defence lawyer for six years now.
Normally in a case such as this one,
we would be advising clients to pursue an action in defamation.
However, these offences were far more serious.
My role was to push things along with the police as quickly
as possible, given how dire the material was.
HANNAH: Andy did continue posting.
He was still posting photos of me and our friends.
He was getting comments from others about what they would do to us.
And Kris would, you know, download them and send them to the police.
SIDNIE: Every few weeks I would be checking in with the police.
They advised us that the matter was still being looked into.
It was really difficult for Hannah during this period,
waiting for an update.
She had to do her best to keep herself distracted.
HANNAH: School was a big refuge
and I just got to be myself and I got to teach.
I think without teaching, I would have fallen apart.
Going there every day and being normal and just doing that
kept my mind very busy.
It was hard though, putting on a brave face
in front of the students when you feel so freaked out like that.
I just was so terrified to be by myself at any time.
I was so worried even to go from my car to my house,
because I thought Andy could just run and get me.
KRIS: To see someone with such a fixation on my partner
was quite confronting.
It made me very angry, very anxious for her safety.
We set up cameras around the house.
We set up location tracking on Hannah's phone.
They were so afraid and so traumatised
that they just bunkered down, just the two of them.
JESSICA: I definitely noticed that Kris and Hannah weren't hanging out
anymore and weren't really keen to engage.
They were usually the drivers of all of us getting together.
I just assumed that they were busy.
KRIS: We really wanted to tell Jess and Rachel
because it just felt wrong not to.
And there were times where we just thought,
"This is ridiculous and they need to know."
But Sidnie thankfully advised that we didn't.
Because if he got any inkling that we knew about it,
if he ripped everything off the websites, which he could do
I'm sure pretty quickly, there would be no case.
Kris and Hannah couldn't let Andrew know that they were on to him.
They had to act like everything was totally normal.
KRIS: Andy would contact us every now and then to catch up,
go for a drink, which was pretty unsettling given what he was doing.
We would basically just tell him that we're already in bed,
or we had other plans, and brush him off a bit.
HANNAH: At one point, we were going to a little festival down the road,
just like a footy festival.
I walked in the gates and got hugged by someone,
and it was Andy, and it was, like,
within 30 seconds of walking into the park.
It was quite incredible.
HANNAH: I didn't think he would be so friendly.
He gave me a big hug and he asked me about my life,
and we stood there like normal, with our other friends,
talking 10 minutes, maybe.
The Andy that I saw that day in the park
was still the Andy that I'm friends with, I WAS friends with.
HANNAH: The weird thing about it is, on one hand, you're so angry
about what has happened,
but at the time when I saw him,
it just...it was just like seeing my good friend.
It still didn't make any sense
that these two people were the same person.
It wasn't particularly clear to us what was actually happening
with the police investigation.
HANNAH: So, about five months after I had reported it, I got a phone call
from the police and I got excited.
So, I really thought that something good was going to happen for us,
and they very politely told me that there was nowhere else
for the case to go and it was going to be suspended.
We were basically livid that...
..nothing could be done.
We'd put together such a...
..what appeared to us to be a strong set of evidence.
SIDNIE: Kris and Hannah weren't going to go away quietly.
We were already liaising with a private investigator,
Dr Allan Watt.
We went back to him and requested a report to properly consolidate
all of the materials that Kris and Hannah had prepared.
ALLAN: I am a digital forensic analyst.
I've been doing this now for 25 years.
I've also spent two years with the New South Wales police.
I've done probably around about 1,500-odd cases.
The spreadsheets and other extracts from the websites
that both Hannah and Kris had produced made my job a lot easier,
but I had to do things in a scientific manner.
I can't remember how many hours I spent on this,
maybe 50, 60 hours, maybe even more.
So, for a police officer to just go and take time out,
spend 50, 60 hours on a job like this
is also not going to see the light of day, it's just too hard.
They are overrun.
By the time I'd finished my report, I was completely certain
that it was Andrew Hayler and nobody else but Andrew Hayler.
SIDNIE: Once we received the final report,
we immediately wrote to police
urgently seeking a reopening of the case.
Soon after that report was sent off, things moved very quickly.
I think within a week, Hannah had had a call from the police,
saying that a detective would be assigned,
and then we found out that Andy's house was going to be raided.
HANNAH: I got a phone call when I was at the supermarket.
They said they would be going into his house
and trying to seize all of his IT and his phones, and everything like that.
And there's a line of people,
and I'm just trying to get her to hold on
while I'm trying to scan my stuff still, because I'm freaking out.
They went into Andy's house and they seized laptops
and they seized hard drives and USBs.
It got to midday or so,
and Hannah called me and said, yeah, it had happened,
they got everything they needed.
Andy had given the passwords,
and they had all the content they needed to charge him.
I think for Hannah and Kris, maybe there was always this little part
of them that wished that this wasn't true
and maybe they had got the wrong person
and maybe they wouldn't find anything.
So, I think when they did find all the evidence and all the photos,
that there was a great sense of validation, but a great sense
of sadness as well, that, "Oh, my gosh, this really is him."
KRIS: At that point, I guess we were able
to start talking about it to people.
We were worried that Rachel and Jess might be upset
that we had kept it from them for so long.
JESSICA: I got a message from Hannah,
and I hadn't heard from her in, like, probably over a year.
Um, so immediately was concerned.
RACHEL: I remember she called me, and I knew that it wasn't good news.
And she said, like, "Where are you? Are you with someone?
"Are you sitting down?"
She said, um, that there was this pretty heinous website,
um, and that a bunch of doctored photos and videos
had been put on and that Rachel had a pretty big thread on there,
and that I had one, too.
I did get Hannah and Kris to send me through
some of the images.
I just felt sick.
RACHEL: I think I was really scared and I think I broke into tears.
This, like, fire of vitality that I always had
just got put out immediately.
Um...
Sorry.
JESSICA: Hannah told me about how many hours they had put into
trying to find the person who did it.
And I remember she said that it was Andy who had done it,
and I just felt my stomach drop.
My response, it was immediate. I just said, "Andy?
"Andy?"
JESSICA: Andy was such a trusted and good friend to me,
that when I did have some pretty terrible experiences,
he was the person that I called.
I couldn't really comprehend that it was someone
so harmless and, like, safe.
Hannah apologised and said how sorry she was that she couldn't tell us.
She apologised for pulling back from all of us,
and I just felt so sad that they had to carry that by themselves
for ages.
NEWSREADER: A Sydney bartender who spent years
digitally altering photos of women he knew
and then posting them to a pornographic website
has been forced to face his victims in court.
SIDNIE: Andrew Hayler was charged with offences
in relation to 26 women.
All of those offences were in relation to
the misuse of carriage service.
He pled guilty to all of the charges which were laid against him.
HANNAH: When we got the sentencing date, it was very exciting
because we were going to have an end to it.
There was a lot of women that I had seen in photos
that I had never met before, and so it was a very strange thing
when they introduced themselves to you and you know them already,
and you don't introduce yourself
because you just feel like, well, I know who you are.
And, like, I mean, I wouldn't say it was nice,
but it was good to be together.
Do you have anything to say to the women that you hurt?
Just hold on. Yeah, I'm really, really sorry.
You're really sorry? Why did you do it?
Just a dark part of my psychology that came out, manifested.
How do you feel about facing all these women today?
I've got to do it.
Thank you, guys.
KRIS: Seeing Andy in court,
even just walking into the Downing Centre,
I was able to finally marry those two people -
um, the Andy that I used to be friends with and the predator.
During court, we heard evidence about Andy's state of mind.
We heard that he had a drug and alcohol problem
during the period of his offending,
that he had a long-term addiction to violent porn.
It was explained that by posting these images that he felt empowered,
that it helped him overcome feelings of sexual inferiority.
But it's impossible for us to understand
how Andy could have done what he did.
(READS) "It's distressing to have some of the happiest moments
"of my life tainted by his disgusting actions."
"Every stranger now represents a potential threat,
"a reminder of the vulnerability and exposure..."
"You shattered the sense of security I used to take for granted.
"The world feels unfamiliar and dangerous.
"I'm constantly anxious."
It was very sad, hearing all the victim impact statements
and understanding all the ways
that so many people had been affected by this.
"I searched for almost a year to feel safe in my body again.
"I could no longer receive my partner's touch with openness.
"I could not feel arousal without feeling shame."
"Discovering Andy was vastly different from the person
"I thought I knew, and the extent of the harm he intended towards me,
"is deeply unsettling."
"Forming new friendships feels impossible.
"Burdened by the constant question, could this person be like you?"
ALISON: We didn't think that there would be a custodial sentence.
It was a very long build-up
and there was just such a tension in the room.
It was very, very palpable.
The judge, she said nine years,
and I, like, I think I just sobbed.
And then she said 5.5 non-parole.
I just...I don't really remember anything after that point.
I think I just cried.
I remember Kris was behind me and my mum was behind me,
and the girls were there.
I think I just grabbed Jess and I just squeezed
and my heart dropped and we were like, "What?"
Like, I think there was so much shock and joy.
KRIS: It was very vindicating, having the judge read out
all of the sort of vile things that he'd written on that website
and acknowledging that they were causing harm.
And I think her words were "profound harm".
It really, really felt like we were listened to as victims,
like the legal system was taking it seriously.
WILL: Hannah emailed me and told me that Hayler had been sentenced
and that it was a significant sentence.
In my mind, that is justice.
Um, it was just a real journey to, um, to get there.
KRIS: After it was all over,
we found out that Sally was actually Will.
Hey. How are you?
We wouldn't have been able to do any of this
or even known about any of this without him.
Some anonymous internet stranger that is just a great person.
That was just a genuine good deed.
HANNAH: There's been a few months now since the court case.
I'm excited to just kind of go back to regular life
and have all my time not, you know, spotted with emails
from random people online and the police, and things like that.
Like, I went to Galapagos for my birthday last year, for my 30th.
JESSICA: I am so, so grateful
to Kris and Hannah for all of the effort
and time that they put in to making sure that justice was served.
She's a bit of an adventurer, yeah!
HANNAH: The process has made me think that Kris and I are a very good team.
And the girls.
I think it was a team effort.
The girls I've met are so incredible.
He picked some very strong and very smart women.
(LAUGHTER AND CONVERSATION)
I look really forward to strengthening again
my relationships with Jess and Rachel
because it's been so long without them.
If I don't see you beforehand.
Congratulations. Thank you.
ALISON: I'm hoping they can put it behind them now.
But I, yeah, I worry.
I worry for them,
about what effect this will continue to have on their life.
KRIS: Hannah and I are just trying to focus on the future.
But while Andy's in prison, this isn't actually over for us
because these photos just keep appearing on other websites.
They still spread and appear in new places
that they hadn't been before, and it's impossible to get rid of them.
HANNAH: When they pop up,
they have my full name on them and they will forever.
So, you know, this part of my life has been wrapped up,
but that will go on for the rest of my life.
I will always have to contend with that.
So, I guess he's gotten the sentence for what he's done to me.
But the future, you don't know.
Captions by Red Bee Media
Copyright Australian Broadcasting Corporation