Wife Shares Horrible Moment She Found Husband’s Child Porn Stash

A NSW woman has told of her horror at discovering that her husband was addicted to child pornography after finding his stash when looking on his computer.

Leah Mouatt, from Penrith in Sydney, appeared on 60 Minutes yesterday to share the moment that her entire world was shattered when she uncovered that her husband was a member of a child porn sharing website.

It started in 2014 when she had suspected that the man she had been married to for six years, Phillip John Vellio, might have been cheating on her. So, Ms Mouatt logged onto his computer to see if her suspicions were true. What she found instead defied belief: a profile on a child pornography site.

She told 60 Minutes the discovery shocked her to her core:

“How could I be with someone for so long and not know?”

Even more horrible was her realisation that Vellio had uploaded images to the website himself, including images of the young daughter of Ms Mouatt’s friends.

“What he’d written underneath this photo told me what the reality was,” she said.

“I knew quite quickly after I saw what I saw that the police had to be called. Things happen to these children that we could never dream of – and he was looking at that stuff.”

She did call police, and they seized a massive 32,000 images and 854 videos from Vellio’s laptop. In the stash were photos of babies, toddlers and trends in various sexual acts with both other children and adults. Vellio went on to be convicted of two counts of being in possession of child pornography, and he received a 12-month good behaviour bond.

Child Porn In Australia

In Australia, the use of child pornography sites and the number of individuals sharing this kind of content has risen dramatically. In 2015 alone, there are more than 11,000 cases reported to the police.

The head of child pornography Task Force Argos, Jon Rouse, said the increase in cases was definitely a worry.

“If you achieve sexual gratification from viewing the image of a child being sexually abused, it cannot be such a quantum leap that you would not take your online sexual fantasies into the real world,” he said.

This worrying increase in child pornography cases has been made worse by the relatively new trend of Australians streaming child sex abuse videos live from the dark web. Both NSW and Victoria have taken a hard stand against child abuse material, increasing maximum prison sentences to 10 years.

Ms Mouatt’s Guilt

Now, years down the track, Ms Mouatt realises that there really weren’t any signs that her husband was actually a child porn addict. So, while she did struggle to accept that she had been unaware of his proclivities, she knows now that she did the right thing when confronted with the situation.

“At the end of the day there wasn’t anything that would tell me what he was really doing, not anywhere in the relationship.”

Unfortunately, due to the stigma attached to those close to child porn addicts, Ms Mouatt has seen her friends, family and community pull away from her, making her a victim as well.