The Skaf gang rapists terrorised Sydney in 2000. Meet the woman who put them behind bars.

Margaret Cunneen SC has had a big career.

She joined the New South Wales Office of Public Prosecutions in 1986 and became Crown Prosecutor and then Deputy Senior Crown Prosecutor over a career spanning more than 30 years.

She's worked on some of the biggest cases of our generation — locking up notorious paedophile Robert "Dolly" Dunn, Graeme Reeves — AKA 'The Butcher of Bega' — and the Skaf gang rapists, to name just a few.

But building notoriety as one of the country's most talented prosecutors also made her a target, and for decades, Cunneen has dealt with people within her own industry trying to tear her down.

From the start, she felt like some of her peers just didn't understand her.

"I noticed that people thought that if you're quite pleasant and polite with people, and polite with the other side, you can't be 'taking it seriously enough'.

"You've got to walk in there with a stern look, and 'don't get too close to people'… and be a bit of an object rather than a person," she told Mamamia's True Crime Conversations.

Listen to the full chat with Margaret Cunneen. Post continues below.

But that was never her style.

"I get very close to the people I work with, and I was criticised very much, I think perhaps in a somewhat sexist fashion, for decades, for being affectionate with young women who'd been terribly assaulted, or parents who'd lost a child," she explained.

"I warmed to those people and thought it would be easier for them if they knew how much it meant to me for them to get justice. I've been criticised for hugging people and having my arm around people and so forth."

For Cunneen, empathy became her superpower, fuelled further as a result of her being a victim of sexual assault as a child herself at the hands of a neighbour.

It was her own experience that first motivated Cunneen into a career in law, and she found she "knew things that other people [in her profession] who only had theoretical knowledge didn't appreciate".

One of the controversies Cunneen found herself at the centre of kicked off in the wake of the Skaf gang rapes, which terrorised Sydney in 2000.

A group of up to 14 teenage boys and young men raped and tortured several young girls and women in gang rape crimes that a judge described as "[events] you hear about or read about only in the context of wartime atrocities".

Cunneen was the lead prosecutor, and successfully put nine of the 14 behind bars. But it was a lecture she gave in 2005 to a group of law students in Newcastle that saw her accused of bias and removed from prosecuting one of the defendant's re-trials in 2007.

Cunneen in 2002, while prosecuting the Skaf gang rapes. Image: AAP/Mick Tsikas.

"Most of it [my lecture] wasn't about the case at all. But the Dean had asked me to comment, because he said so many of the students wondered why all the Skaf cases are still limping on through the system… So I gave a bit of a background on the allegations and the way its gone through the courts," she told True Crime Conversations.

Cunneen was careful to only share facts that were already available in the public domain to explain why there were still appeals and mentions in court.

But it was used against her.

"Some lawyers — who didn't want me in the case, that's all it was about, they've told me since — thought it would buy some time with the Court of Criminal appeal, saying that I should never be talking about cases that I might be prosecuting in the future," Cunneen explained.

She was accused of giving the victim a public character reference and of jeopardising an unbiased jury, and was removed from the case. That decision was described as unprecedented, because it effectively allowed an accused person to choose who prosecutes them.

The ramifications were that the victim opted not to return to court, because Cunneen wasn't going to be there to support her; and the re-trial resulted in the defendant, MG, being acquitted of three counts of aggravated sexual assault.

But the attack on Cunneen didn't stop there. Some of her colleagues also tried to make complaints to the Legal Services Commissioner attempting to discredit her and damage her future prospects, calling her a "disgrace to our profession".

Thankfully, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) at the time, Nicholas Cowdery, expressed his complete confidence in Cunneen, and the Legal Services commissioner found that her apparent wrongdoing was only a 'technical' contravention of the bar rules.

She went on to be appointed Deputy Senior Crown Prosecutor that same year.

Watch: Cunneen talking about how others perceive her on the job. Post continues below.

It wasn't the first time colleagues tried to destroy her career, and certainly wasn't the last.

In 2014, Cunneen's phone was confiscated and home raided by the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), and she was accused of perverting the course of justice by advising her son's girlfriend to fake chest pains to avoid a breath test after a car crash.

She wasn't present at the crash, and the accusation came from a tongue-in-cheek chat she had with a smash repairer some time after the crash, as the car was being towed away.

His calls were being covertly recorded for an unrelated reason, and Cunneen informed him that the owner of the car was the DPP, causing ICAC to jump to the conclusion she had let someone else drive a departmental vehicle — even though it was all completely legit and under a lease arrangement.

Eventually, the allegations levelled at Cunneen were proven to be a misunderstanding, and it was found that ICAC shouldn't have been involved at all.

With her reputation and personal life dragged through the mud, Cunneen took ICAC to the Supreme Court, which ruled it a knockout in her favour, with the investigation described as "unreasonable, unjust and oppressive".

"The timing has always seemed very odd to me, because I had just completed a stint of about 18 months as a Commissioner inquiring into the investigations of paedophile priests in Newcastle and the day before this crash, I had given my report to the governor — so I was going back to my job. But there were all these rumours swirling about me being appointed a Supreme Court Judge," she told True Crime Conversations.

It's a job Cunneen insists she wasn't interested in, preferring to be the "captain of a team going in a certain direction". But she believes that, thanks to the rumours, there were "forces at work" trying to discredit her ahead of a possible appointment.

"No one wanted me to be a judge… and this [ICAC] was all a bit of a distraction," she said.

While embroiled in the controversy, Cunneen's main concern was not the professional ramifications, but rather, dragging her family through it. She knew the truth would prevail, and "luckily my family… we're a martial arts family, and they were like 'just keep fighting mum, we're all in.'"

Cunneen and her husband, Gregory Wyllie, share three sons and have been married nearly 40 years.

Cunneen left public office in 2019, and has been working in defence ever since — which she credits as giving her a fantastic new challenge and providing her with some of the proudest moments of her career.

Cunneen arriving at court in 2023 as a barrister for NRL player Jarryd Hayne, after swapping to working in defence in 2019. Image: Getty/Don Arnold.

Looking back at her work achievements over the past 48 years, alongside the controversies that have tried and failed to tear her down along the way, Cunneen has a theory.

"Some people get jealous of people who look like their life's quite easy," she told True Crime Conversations.

She's known from the start her jovial, kind and positive attitude has rubbed people the wrong way.

"I used to be a girl guide and one of the rules is 'a guide has courage and is cheerful in all difficulties', and I've always thought we owe it to the world not to be going around with a long face complaining about everything when everyone has their problems," she explained.

But as Andrew L. Aptly, co-author of her book, The Boxing Butterfly, aptly observed, "perhaps they mistook her niceness for weakness".

And wea Margaret Cunneen certainly is not.

Feature image: Emma Phillips.