A man who raped, abused and controlled multiple partners over a decade treated one "like a prisoner" and tortured her, a court has heard.
"I grieve for myself and the life I will never get to live," one woman said on Tuesday, holding back tears.
"You treated me like the dirt beneath your shoes."
Earlier this year, jurors found Shay Kahu Murphy guilty of three counts of sexual intercourse without consent and six counts of assault, relating to two victims.
A month later, the 31-year-old pleaded guilty to choking and two counts of assault, relating to two other women.
The four victims have each given express permission to be identified in media reporting and court judgements.
"They want the offender to be named in public," acting Director of Public Prosecutions Anthony Williamson SC told the ACT Supreme Court.
Sitting in the dock, Murphy only once broke from his firm, upright seated position and stone-faced demeanour.
But it wasn't in response to victims taking to the witness stand and looking him in the eye to detail how the man's violence and coercion had irreparably changed their lives.
It instead happened more than 90 minutes into his sentence hearing, when defence barrister James Maher said the New Zealand-born man would likely become "estranged" from his young daughter.
"That is a consequence purely of his own actions," Mr Maher said.
Murphy bowed his head, wiped away tears, and quickly returned to his position.
The emotion was so fleeting his victims and their supporters, who filled up three rows of the public gallery, may have missed it entirely.
Murphy is set to be sentenced for multiple rapes and for pinning down and subjecting one former partner to "waterboarding", an infamous form of torture which simulates drowning.
That woman said she was "tortured at the hand of someone who supposedly loved me".
Among other crimes, he also forced a victim to cut herself, spat in one woman's eye and accused her of being a sex worker, and engaged in one attack the prosecutor described as "brutal, frenzied and sustained".
"Your abuse is insidious," one victim told Murphy in court.
"You would gaslight me and flip situations on me so fast I lost sight of what was real."
That woman was left "totally alone" when she felt she had no choice but to quit her job and move interstate, where she was told she would be "safer".
Two further victim impact statements read to the court detailed fear-filled and isolating relationships where Murphy degraded and controlled his victims, setting "rules" on how they could act.
"Robbed of my innocence," one victim wrote.
"I didn't think I would make it out of this relationship alive," another wrote.
Mr Williamson described Murphy's actions as "extreme violence and gratuitous cruelty", and the man who perpetrated them as a "significant danger to the community".
"The incidents are grave and they were committed over a protracted period of time," Mr Williamson said.
The prosecutor also submitted the offender showed no remorse for his conduct against the two victims who were forced into a trial and painted as "dishonest".
Mr Maher said his client had acted with an "abnormal and irrational amount of distrust, jealousy and control".
"These offences occurred in the context of what were undoubtedly unhealthy relationships where the accused perpetrated a large amount of abuse outside of individual offences your honour is dealing with."
The barrister also said there was a "causal nexus" between Murphy's offending and the man's early exposure to domestic abuse and violence.
"The offender's own behaviours have their origins in something. He didn't just decide when he was 16 to be violent towards his intimate partners," Mr Maher said.
Justice David Mossop reserved his sentencing decision until Thursday.
- Support is available for those who may be distressed. Phone Lifeline 13 11 14; 1800-RESPECT 1800 737 732; Canberra Rape Crisis Centre 6247 2525.
