New allegations against convicted rapist Ralph Carr revealed: ‘I was blacking out while saying no’

When Sophie* started working at Ralph Carr Management just after her 21st birthday, she thought she had landed her dream job: red carpet events, celebrity clients, even international travel.

Sophie had been hired as an intern in RCM’s Melbourne office in the mid-2010s and, before long, she had deferred her degree in film and television to work there full-time. Within months, her hard work had paid off: Carr had invited her on a trip to LA with a high-profile client.

“I’m nervous but excited!!” she texted a friend as soon as she landed.

“It’ll be the best experience of your life,” her friend replied.

Within two days, that excitement had turned to trauma and shame: “I feel violently ill at all of this,” she messaged another friend hours after allegedly being assaulted by her boss, who was then 55. “Just gonna try and forget.”

In August Carr was sentenced to six years in jail after being found guilty of raping a former employee in 2023, when she was in her 20s and he was 66. He pleaded not guilty and has lodged an appeal.

The week after he was found guilty, Guardian Australia published the allegations of dozens of former female employees accusing Carr of verbally abusive and intimidating behaviour in the workplace dating back to the 90s, with several also accusing him of sexual harassment. He denied the allegations.

Sophie was part of that investigation – but there is more to her story. Today she is joined by two more women who are coming forward to the Guardian with new allegations of unwanted physical sexual advances by Carr, in incidents dating from the mid-2000s and all involving women in their early 20s.

In an email to the Guardian, Carr’s lawyer said the allegations “are historic in nature and unsupported by any evidence whatsoever. Our client has no recollection that factual circumstances as alleged ever took place and vehemently denies that they did.”

The Guardian understands there is an ongoing police inquiry involving Carr. A spokesperson confirmed that Victoria police are investigating an alleged sexual assault in Melbourne in 2005 and said: “As investigations are ongoing it would be inappropriate to comment further.”

‘Pushing me and holding me down’

Sophie alleges that Carr assaulted her not long after she landed in LA. After a work dinner with him, she met up for drinks with her friend Mel* in Beverly Hills. Mel was there with two others and afterwards all four went to the bar of a Hollywood hotel where they met up with Carr.

At some point, Carr invited everybody up to his suite. And at a later point, everyone else left.

“I was shitfaced, obviously,” says Sophie, who remembers only snippets of what followed. “I’ve only had this feeling before when I’ve been put under for a procedure, when you feel the world rush around you – it felt like that, and he was pushing me and holding me down, kissing me and grabbing my crotch.

“The last thing I remember is me blacking out while I was saying no, and he was pushing me down.” He touched her over the top of her underwear, she says, but she doesn’t remember being penetrated. The next morning she woke up in Carr’s bed, naked but for his T-shirt, “my clothes and underwear on the floor, covered in vomit”.

A series of text messages that night show how concerned her friend had been about leaving Sophie alone with Carr. Mel wrote:

Sophie replied: “Hah I’m okay?” – but 23 minutes later, her texts became garbled: “All yo” and “D”, and then “Henge alllllll too or good”.

Carr was in the suite’s living area when Sophie woke up in his bed the next morning. She threw up in the toilet, found her clothes and dressed quickly, and was down the hotel hallway when he called her back. “He said, ‘You forgot something’ and he’s holding up my underwear,” she says. “He had the most fucked look in his eyes.”

Sophie ended up locked outside the Airbnb she had meant to stay in that night and texted Mel again while she waited to be let in:

The women talked on the phone and later texted again. “I think he just tried to kiss me,” Sophie texted. “And was feeling me up.” Looking back, Sophie says she was trying to laugh it off.

“I told him this morning that I don’t remember anything from being up at his room,” Sophie wrote to Mel. “Which is true. But I remember him leaning in to kiss me. And getting me. And me being like nooooooooo. Hahahah.”

Mel replied:

“That email” was sent by hotel staff to Sophie the next morning, describing “an issue we had last night” in Carr’s suite. A noise complaint had been made by the guests in the neighbouring room, which shared a locked adjoining door. They said somebody had tried to get through that door.

“Either Mr. Carr or his guest was banging on the connecting door and trying to get into the connecting room and saying, ‘Let me in! Let me in!’. Obviously, the guests that were staying in the connecting room were very scared and upset about the situation.”

Carr got Sophie to reply:

“I’ve just spoken to Ralph about this. Apparently there was a prom after party on the other side of the neighbours with lots of high school kids … Ralph and his guests have said it was one of the high school kids that was yelling this and definitely not him or his guests.”

The staff member replied that the guests who were complaining only had one adjoining door, and that it connected to “the suite that Ralph is in”. Carr was charged a $250 fee. The hotel has not responded to questions from the Guardian.

Sophie will never know exactly what happened or if it was her banging on the door that night – but, she tells the Guardian, there are moments she remembers.

“I don’t feel like I was raped … but he definitely touched me, and he definitely hovered over me, definitely held me down, I definitely said no,” she says. “I definitely woke up in his T-shirt, [otherwise] fully naked with my clothes on the other side of the room.”

Mel wasn’t the only friend Sophie messaged after the alleged assault; that afternoon, LA time, she also messaged her best friend, Jenna*, back home, over Facebook.

With Jenna, there was less laughter.

Sophie got so fukin drunk i spewed in ralphs toilet

Sophie then i was like oh ill just sleep in his bed

Sophie then he pulled a move on me

Sophie fucking hell

Sophie do NOT tell anyone

Sophie but legit he was trying to have sex with me for sure like went in to kiss me

Sophie and stuff

Sophie and i was pulling away it was not ok …

Sophie JENNA i know its so early but i need my bestfriend to tell me its okay!!! coz i can’t tell anyone else!

Jenna finally replied: “Soph. That’s really really bad. I don’t think I can tell you that’s okay.”

Sophie and i woke up with no undies (thats really the only thing im massively scared about)

Sophie and in his t shirt

Jenna You weren’t wearing undies…?

Sophie no….

Jenna Oh come on soph

Jenna Stop being naive

Sophie i would of remebered [sic] though

Jenna Would you have though…

Sophie yes! coz i remember the kiss!

Jenna Who took your undies off … Yourself?

Sophie im guessingggggggg

Jenna Jesus soph

“It’s not like he isn’t the type of person to do shit after you slept,” Jenna continued. “You need to never get drunk around him again.”

Later Sophie wrote: “I can’t remember shit about the night, the only thing i remember is lying in his bed and his lips touching mine and me being like ewww nooooo and him being like common [sic]!!! And like feeling me up etc and me rolling over”.

Sophie And then I’m guessing I vommed

Sophie And then I woke up naked in his t shirt

Sophie And I’m hope the only reason that that happened was because I vommed on everything

Sophie I just don’t no why I didn’t have undies on and that scares the fuck out of me

Sophie spent at least another year at Ralph Carr Management, weathering the alleged daily abuse and toxic workplace revealed by the Guardian in August. She remembers Carr yelling and swearing at his young female staff and demanding they be on call 24/7.

She says she would have to race to his desk when he shouted her name, and bend over him and type emails for him in such uncomfortably close proximity that she could feel his legs touching her.

Still, she stayed in the job. As a 21-year-old, she says, she had more creative power and opportunities than most her age. “He’d actually trust my opinion,” she says. “And he wasn’t as evil to me as he was to the others. I don’t know if he generally liked me better, or if it was because of the incident, or if, in his idea of the workplace, [having favourites] was a tactic.”

A year after the LA trip, she was finally considering quitting. “I honestly don’t know how I stayed this long,” she texted Mel. “Especially after everything that happened in LA…”

She questioned whether she could have been given a sleeping pill or drugged on the night in question, to which Mel replied: “I mean, you were pretty drunk.”

Sophie continued: “Yeah I was fucked but not fucked enough to wake up naked in my boss’s bed (that was covered in vom) with the last memory of the night was me being fully clothed yelling no no get off me as he was literally on top of me kissing me and touching me on the fan.”

In the same exchange, Mel tried to urge Sophie to tell someone – and to finally quit: “Can’t let him get away with his abuse.”

Sophie never went to a doctor for a toxicology test to see if there were drugs in her system. She ended up losing hair from stress. “It definitely impacted me psychologically,” she says. “Feeling something bad happened, and I’ll never know what happened.”

She spoke to Australian police about that night in 2025, after hearing about the rape allegation for which Carr was convicted – but given that the alleged assault took place in a different jurisdiction, they told her there was nothing they could do.

Sophie’s mother remembers how much that time affected her daughter. “She was so excited to get her dream job in such a hotly contested field,” she says.

But the cracks didn’t take long to appear. “She said to me, ‘Mum I’ve got my dream job and the worst boss in the world.’ But to me it felt like she could handle him.”

It would take years for Sophie to tell her mother about that night in LA. “We were sitting in the car,” she says. “She burst into tears. I burst into tears … It’s every mother’s nightmare. And everyone knows what women go through when they accuse someone in that type of field.”

After Carr was convicted of rape, Sophie’s mother was horrified when the former Australian rules footballer Sam Newman suggested that the young victim may have had “buyer’s remorse”. “No wonder sexual assault victims are so reluctant to go and relive the trauma through the courts,” she says.

‘I’d given him no sign that I was interested’

Sophie’s was the latest allegation of assault heard by the Guardian. One of the earliest dates back to 2006, when Tess, who was 22 and is using her first name only, experienced the first of two unwanted sexual advances from Carr, then 46.

It was the Australia Day weekend, and Tess met up with Carr and her friend Caitlin*, who was seeing one of Carr’s acquaintances at the time. After drinks one night the group went back to Carr’s Clifton Street house for more.

At some point, Caitlin and her date went to Carr’s guesthouse, leaving Carr and Tess alone. Tess remembers what allegedly happened next as “disgusting”.

“He just disappeared and then came [back] around the corner only in his undies,” she says. “I’d given him no sign that I was interested in him. He came and climbed on top of me. It was gross. Gross.”

She told him no, she says, and went home soon afterwards. The next morning, when Caitlin asked Tess where she had gone, Tess told Caitlin what had happened.

“We were like, ‘He’s absolutely disgusting,’” Caitlin remembers of the discussion. “This man was … so much older than us.”

On Whatsapp in 2015, the pair remembered the night:

Tess wasn’t more than tipsy that night and managed to get away – but she was “very drunk” when Carr took her and Caitlin to Love Machine, a Melbourne nightclub, a month or so later.

“He walked straight into the nightclub, knew everyone on the door, made you feel VIP,” Tess says. “He’s looking after us, I’m not going to do anything to be ungrateful.”

That’s why, she thinks, he talked her into going to a part of the building that she believes was not accessible to the public. “There was no one down there – he was trying to kiss me, and tried to put his hands down my pants, and I laughed it off. I didn’t feel scared – but I didn’t ask for him to touch me.”

He got to the top of her underwear inside her pants, she alleges. “He tried to have a grope around, and I pulled him out.” They went back to the main area of the club and Tess told Caitlin what had happened.

“We just laughed over it,” Tess says now. “Like, ‘Yuck. What a creepy old guy.’ But yeah, I got out – and it’s horrible to read about people that did not.”

‘I was just like a shell of a human’

Kayla, who is using her first name only, was 22 in 2014 when she started working for Carr, by now in his mid-50s; she experienced the same bullying, intimidation and toxic workplace culture detailed previously. “Any time he was coming into the office everyone would shit themselves,” she says. Looking back, she finds his volatility “ridiculous” but “at the time it was petrifying”.

“He used to just sit back and you had to stand between his fucking knees and the keyboard,” she remembers. “I’m a small person but like, yeah. It was just not nice.”

The first time she felt uncomfortable with him was on a Sunday night, shortly after she started.

Carr had invited her to the Bridge hotel with a group to watch a client perform in a televised talent show – but when she got there, it was just the two of them. “I was naive, you know? … I’d only just started working there.”

Her boss paid for her drinks – Kayla says lots of them – and then offered to drive her to the train station, which was near the office. He stopped there and asked her to join him for a nightcap, which she declined. He needed to pick something up and she says he told her not to look in the glovebox while he was gone, allegedly saying that there were drugs in there.

“It was like he was just trying to bait me into wanting to have a good night,” she says. “He was just being super bizarre.” She remembers him leaning his arm on her leg in the car at one point; he wasn’t forceful, she says: “I think he was testing the waters of what he could get away with.”

When Carr returned to the car, she told him she could just catch a train home; he gave her $50 for a cab instead. On the drive, she texted her housemate Jacquie, who is also using only her first name, telling her that he had hit on her.

The next day, Kayla says, “he treated me like absolute dirt at work. Just so, so abusive.”

Still, she stayed in the job: “I assumed that this was what the music industry was and you just had to put up with it.” But at that year’s Christmas party, hosted in his home with lots of alcohol and drugs available, she alleges that he tried again.

She remembers asking to use the bathroom; after he showed her there, he followed her in and grabbed her by the waist from behind. When he “crept his hands up towards the front of my chest”, she says, she flipped around before he reached her breasts and told him to get out.

He played it off as though there’d been a miscommunication and at first she let herself believe it. “I don’t know,” she explains, “you’re inebriated, and someone’s being nice to you for the first time in months.”

So when Carr invited her to see the upstairs of the house, she followed him. But this time “it was definitely clear that he was trying to do the wrong thing”.

When he got to the bedroom, “I was like, ‘Oh, fuck, here we go,’” she says. He put his arm around her, she says, and went to guide her in – but she said no and stayed at the door. His wife was pregnant at the time. He sat on his bed and pleaded with her, saying, “No one’s going to know.”

“I didn’t want to lose my job so I wasn’t telling him to fuck off or making a scene. I was just like, ‘No, I’m not comfortable’ … It was so far-fetched from reality. At what point did he think that was going to happen?”

She left that party unharmed but the workplace bullying worsened – and its impact on her was significant.

“I started drinking two bottles of wine before bed just to try and get to sleep because I was so anxious … Mum and Dad were fucking freaking out, and it was just terrible. I ended up getting a bald patch and I was down to, like, 48 kilos.”

Her friend Jacquie remembers this too: “When she got the job she was so excited,” she says. “It was so noticeable by the end how much he tore her character apart. She was a shell of herself by the time she got out of there.”

Kayla first spoke to the Guardian in 2018, at the beginning of an eight-year investigation, but she contacted police in January 2025 after she heard about the rape allegation against Carr, and detailed some of her alleged experiences over email in the hope she could support the victim.

On coming forward with her story now, she says: “I got out relatively lucky in comparison … It was traumatic at the time. But when you know so many other people went through it, and when you understand he’s a predator and it wasn’t you in particular … I feel very validated.”

*Names have been changed

• Do you know more? Contact Steph Harmon steph.harmon@theguardian.com

• Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse is available at Full Stop Australia. Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html