A 60 Minutes investigation has obtained footage of the treatment meted out to Lee-Anne over 18 months between 2019 and 2020.
The videos reveal that the complaints made by Lee-Anne, who is not cognitively impaired, only worsened the behaviour of her carers, Lisa Wilson, Monika Paniczko and Anastasia Moutsos.
The footage captured Wilson, then aged 25, sticking her finger and then a cylinder into Lee-Anne’s mouth for her own amusement and yelling, “Aw, she hasn’t got a gag reflex.”
In another video, Paniczko, who had worked with Lee-Anne for 17-years, can be seen listening to a broadcast about health workers dying of coronavirus.
Paniczko says: “Maybe I have corona … if I have it, I want you to have it.”
She then leans over Lee-Anne’s face and appears to breathe and spit into her mouth.
“There you go … we both have it,” she tells Lee-Anne.
NDIS Minister Bill Shorten.Credit: 60 Minutes
NDIS Minister Bill Shorten has vowed he will try to place life bans on the disgraced disability support staff to prevent them working with vulnerable people under the scheme.
Shorten, who was provided the footage by 60 Minutes, said the actions of the carers were dehumanising and made him angry.
He said Scope, a large not-for-profit provider of disability services in Victoria and NSW, would be watched.
“I thought it was just evil,” Shorten said. “I don’t want to believe that there are people who will treat other people in the manner in which I saw in that video.
“These people acting with such callous indifference to Lee-Anne, it’s just shocking. It’s cruel. It’s a betrayal of Lee-Anne and it’s actually a betrayal of the good people who work in disability. It was shocking.
“I’ve reached out to Robert and Lorraine, Lee-Anne’s parents.”
In October 2020, Scope reported the abuse to Victoria Police after being handed the CCTV files by the Mackeys.
Wilson was immediately sacked. But Scope chose to move the other two carers, Paniczko and Moutsos, to work at another residential house.
They were both dismissed six months later when charges were laid by police.
All three women initially pleaded guilty at the Broadmeadows Magistrates’ Court in Melbourne in June 2022 to assault.
Wilson’s defence was that her actions were intended as a joke.
After convictions were initially recorded against the trio, they launched appeals in the County Court.
In separate appeals, Moutsos and Wilson pleaded guilty to assault but argued successfully for convictions not to be recorded.
Paniczko convinced an appeal court to withdraw her guilty plea and drop one of the charges against her. For the remaining charge, she entered a diversion program, meaning if she acknowledges responsibility and completes certain conditions, no finding of guilt will be made against her.
Paniczko’s conditions included giving a verbal and written apology to Lee-Anne and donating $500 to the Lort Smith Animal Hospital.
Wilson, considered the ring leader, was ordered to perform 175 hours of unpaid community work.
Moutsos was ordered to perform 80 hours of unpaid community work.
A County Court judge ruled that the secretly recorded video evidence recorded by the Mackeys was admissable during Paniczo’s appeal.
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Wilson was banned by the NDIS Commission for five years, while Paniczko and Moutsos were both prohibited for three years.
Police Detective Senior Constable Travis Kinghorn, who investigated the case, urged people to report abuse in the disability sector.
“There’s no excuse for this type of behaviour,” he said.
The Mackeys said the ordeal had been traumatic and left Lee-Anne with psychological scarring.
“[It] breaks my heart to see that she’s lost so much trust in people that care for her because she’d known them for so long,” Lorraine said. “And she does see a psychologist and her trust levels have gone to zero since … these incidents happened.”
Lee-Anne remains a client of Scope and now lives in another of its houses.
Scope acting CEO Lisa Evans, who was not in charge at the time of the offending, said she was appalled by the conduct.
Evans said she had met the Mackeys to apologise.
“The videos are some of the worst things that I’ve ever seen,” she said. “It is appalling what happened to Lee-Anne and it is unthinkable to think that that happened to her.
“It cuts right to the core of who we are as people and it’s very, very distressing footage.”
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