Amon remains on bail ahead of a sentencing hearing on 27 November
Jury convicts former NSW MP Rory Amon of raping 13-year-old boy
A New South Wales supreme court jury found former Liberal MP Rory Amon guilty on Friday of raping a 13-year-old boy, after about four hours of deliberation. Amon, 37, was convicted of one count of sexual intercourse with a person aged between 10 and 14 and of indecently assaulting a child. He is facing the possibility of a significant jail term.
The charges related to Amon’s interactions with a boy he met on an adults-only website, the court heard. Amon and the boy exchanged explicit images before a 2017 meeting in the carpark of the boy’s apartment block.
The conviction came at Amon’s second supreme court trial. A different jury acquitted him in March on eight separate charges of child sexual offending but could not reach a verdict on the two counts decided on Friday.
Amon always maintained his innocence, saying he held an honest and reasonable belief that the boy was over the age of 16. The original trial was told the boy inflated his age when signing up to the gay hook-up app, and again while talking with Amon.
At the time he first contacted the youth, Amon was working full-time for the federal MP for Mackellar, Jason Falinski. Amon went on to serve two terms on Northern Beaches council before being elected as the Liberal MP for the state seat of Pittwater in 2023.
The charges ended Amon’s career in state politics, forcing his expulsion from the Liberal party and his resignation after his election in March 2023. His exit had implications for the state Liberals, which lost the formerly safe seat to a teal independent at the subsequent byelection.
Amon remains on bail and will return to court for a sentencing hearing on 27 November.
He is the third former NSW MP convicted of sexual offences in recent years. The former Kiama MP and Coalition minister Gareth Ward was jailed in 2025 for the sexual abuse of two young men, including a political staffer who was intoxicated after an event at NSW Parliament House. Ward’s three-year-nine-month minimum term expires in April 2029.
The former NSW minister Milton Orkopoulos was found guilty in 2023 of sexually abusing teenage boys while he was a state Labor MP. A jury found the 65-year-old guilty of 26 charges of sexual offending against four underage boys and supplying them with drugs over a decade, ending in 2003. Orkopoulos had already served more than a decade in prison for sexual assault of a minor, indecent assault, supplying heroin and cannabis and other offences.
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