TALE TO SET YOUR TEETH ON EDGE
The well-to-do dentist, his creepy assault, failed marriage and get-out-of-jail card ...
As sex offenders go, George Koudos the dirty dentist is not the worst there is, just another creep who should have known better. Prison is full of people who have committed more serious crimes than the sleazy dentist did. But prison tends to trap life’s losers – too stupid, too poor or too damaged to slither through the system the way someone as slippery as Koudos can.
George David Koudos has “resources” – the cash and contacts to avoid incarceration in the way common criminals cannot.
The law, properly and promptly applied, protects us all. But it is slow and clumsy at weighing the damage done by a person in a position of trust who sexually assaults someone vulnerable. Which is what Koudos did.
It happened in early December 2017, when Creepy Koudos and his wife held a Christmas party at home in a fashionable inner suburb.
Their children’s nanny, a young woman then in her 20s, dropped in for a drink after attending a Christmas party nearby with her parents. We will call her Alice, not her given name. The dentist and his wife knew her family, in fact, the couple had met Alice through her parents seven years earlier, blurring the line between professional and personal in ways that the predatory exploit. Koudos’s wife worked for Alice’s father’s firm and Koudos was Alice’s dentist, intertwined ties that made what happened more painful. Alice arrived about 10.15pm. On her way in, she saw a woman friend and chatted briefly. Later, Alice remembered they’d spoken about the woman leaving early because her child was feeling sick. The point being, as Alice recalls, she was “fully coherent at that stage”. She then sipped a gin and tonic and posed for some snaps with the dentist’s wife, a friend as well as employer. She chatted to friends of the family. “I presume I had more than one drink,” she recalls. “But this is where it gets weird. I have only flashbacks of what happened next.” She recalls walking outside because she felt faint. She recalls tripping into a bush, scratching her leg. She recalls walking on a cobblestone lane, the one where her phone and wallet fell from her handbag.
Looking back, she can’t help wondering if a drink had been spiked (much later, Alice and a friend had drinks spiked in a bar “and it felt the same”.)
She made it back to the Koudos house, wobbly and disoriented. The children had been sent to relatives for the night, so she went into the son’s bedroom, lay down on the empty bunk and dozed off.
The dentist’s wife brought Alice a glass of water, tucked her in and left the door open.
Alice: “Next thing I know is George Koudos is on top of me with a hand pulling up my shirt. The shirt buttons are undone. I’m digitally penetrated. I look but I can’t fight.”
Koudos’s wife appeared in the doorway and
yelled at him. He hurried out. Alice was groggy.
“I wake up at maybe 6 or 6.30,” she recalls. She found Ms Koudos mopping the floor and guessed she had been up all night. She sensed a coldness that would not be explained until years later when it was revealed that Koudos had lied about the incident to his wife, claiming he’d been tempted into a consensual fling rather than committed an unprovoked sexual assault.
Alice realised she had lost a friend, a loving connection with children she’d cared for almost since birth, and her own peace of mind.
The one thing she had not lost was self respect.
She borrowed a phone to order a ride home to Collingwood. When she got there, she went to her parents’ room. They were still asleep.
“I stand there like a ghost. Mum wakes up and sits up bolt upright,” she says. That’s when Alice’s family – happy, generous, friendly people – fell into a dark place.
They felt shock, anger and regret. Later came twinges of self reproach, the inevitable “what ifs”. What if they had never met Koudos? What if they had never introduced family members to him? What if Alice hadn’t gone to their party?
Those feelings and more would return. But on that Sunday morning, the family was numbed. Alice called Lifeline, then a counsellor, and forced herself to whisper the phrase she would later say many times: “I have been sexually assaulted.”
They went to the Royal Women’s Hospital. As they left the house, Alice’s father stepped aside to take a call.
Alice asked him who was calling so early on a Sunday.
“The police,” he said. “Someone found your wallet and phone and handed them in at South Melbourne police station, and they’re asking if you’re OK.”
What Alice did not realise was that her father had just told the police he thought she had been sexually assaulted. At the hospital, her answers to questions asked by medical professionals confirmed what her parents already sensed but she did not want to spell out.
She did not yet feel strong enough to lay charges against the man who had betrayed her trust, personally, as an employer and as her dentist.
“I was so mortified I refused to do anything about it. I just couldn’t fathom it,” she says.
To disguise her distress, for 18 months she buried herself in study, hobbies and other work. She avoided going anywhere near the suburb of the attack. She still does.
Koudos might not have
realised it then, but he had lit a slow fuse that would scorch his lucrative career and eventually torch his reputation.
At the beginning he was able to bluff his wife with the fabrication about a consensual drunken liaison.
One problem with that story was that because he’d been trying to lose weight, Koudos was not drinking much, which suggested that when he claimed he was “wasted” at the time, it implied use of substances other than alcohol. The possibility that a dentist (legally able to access restricted painkillers and sedatives) might abuse drugs himself also highlights the question that Alice asks: was she drugged with a spiked drink? If her drink were spiked, it would cast an even more sinister light on the assault.
Of course, supplying a target with potent mixed drinks, Canberra style, has the effect a sexual predator wants: weakened physical defences and blurred or blank memory.
Despite damage to his marriage, Koudos might have thought he’d dodged a bullet. It seems he concentrated on rescuing his reputation.
It is possibly a coincidence that from 2018 he ramped up a new interest in volunteer charity work. going overseas to treat poor people’s teeth.
Koudos’s sudden passion for good works was described in glowing terms in dental trade publications, in which a friendly reporter highlighted his 15 volunteer trips to Vanuatu with the Australian Christian Dental Aid group.
Apart from his new missionary zeal, Koudos also joined Rotary. A Rotary publication praised his “strong volunteer mindset”, stating “In addition to his work as a volunteer dentist in Vanuatu, he also volunteers on a fortnightly basis at an innercity food truck service.”
If someone had advised Koudos to play nice guy, it backfired 18 months after the assault when he approached Alice with an “apology” .
He came to her door in May 2019, describing himself to another visitor as “a friend”. He told Alice he was sorry for “doing what I did”.
The visit horrified her, triggering her distress again.
She slammed the door, called her mother, and later the police. Finally, she told her story in detail. Police set up a taped phone call in which Koudos cagily conceded to Alice he had committed the assault, though he did not admit the invasive act that constitutes statutory rape.
When police questioned him, he gave a no-comment interview.
Creepy Koudos was on the hook but a long way from being landed. Meanwhile, his wife learnt the truth and decided to level charges against him, too – of assaulting and abusing her more than once.
Koudos had his licence to practise suspended, costing him a quarter of a million dollars a year. But he could still draw profits from the busy practice, which was worth millions if he sold.
He could afford the advice from the sort of advisers whose skills keep well-heeled clients out of court as long as possible, within the rules. The Koudos camp played the game to the end and into time on. Prosecuting his assault of Alice was complicated by the parallel legal battle with his (now) ex-wife, which cost him a $2000 fine and a goodbehaviour bond.
Alice did not see him for more than four years, until she and her family attended court in January, and in March to see him sentenced at last.
In theory, a man can get up to 10 years for sexual assault. In practice, it’s not that way for well-defended “cleanskins” with no prior convictions and a list of good works. Such as his $10,000 donation to charity and a timely loan to a couple to send their son to a school for autistic children.
Plea bargaining vaporised the rape charge. Koudos pleaded guilty to sexual assault and was given a twoyear correction order to do 350 hours of unpaid community work and to complete a men’s behavioural change program.
He stood in the dock, a stumpy 45-year-old man, his hair slicked into a topknot that would suit a teenage footballer, as Alice and her parents finally had their say in front of family and friends.
Alice’s father spoke for both parents, perhaps parents everywhere, when he made a victim impact statement.
“There is a saying ‘You are only as happy as your least happy child’,” he began. “Since 10 December 2017, this has been our life …” He spoke for a few minutes, every line touching and sincere.
Then Alice stepped up: “George, you made a choice six years ago, which to this day has a crushing impact on me as well as the lives of my family and friends. The horror of being violated and betrayed by you, someone I did trust, has permanently scarred me.
“I have lost six years, two months, 25 days (and counting) of my life. I have lived in a constant state of shame, completely and utterly mortified … about what you did to me through no fault of my own. The constant flashbacks remain … I am a 35year-old woman who checks under the bed each night.”
When she’d almost finished she turned and looked squarely at him. “George, remember that you had a choice, yet you gave me none.”
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I stand there like a ghost. Mum wakes up and sits bolt upright ‘Alice’ Victim of dentist George Koudos