It is three months since Tessa Sullivan resigned as a Melbourne city councillor, alleging the then mayor, Robert Doyle, had sexually harassed and assaulted her over several months.

And it has been five weeks since Doyle received the draft report of the investigation into Sullivan’s claims, and those of another councillor, Cathy Oke, who has also alleged sexual harassment.

Sullivan has said nothing bar a flurry of angry tweets last weekend, adhering to a council request to keep silent to ensure integrity of the inquiry. But now she wants her say. Frustrated by how she has been treated by parts of the media, especially Melbourne’s biggest-selling newspaper, the Herald Sun, and infuriated by the delay in the release of the report, she wants to defend her reputation and explain why she resigned on 15 December.



“I don’t want to be some advocate for the #MeToo movement,” she says. “I’m not interested in being some warrior.



“When something like this happens, you lose so much confidence and you feel so dirty and ashamed and humiliated. You think [it’s] the most disgusting thing that ever happened to you and that everyone’s going to know about it.



“There is absolutely no benefit to coming forward with something like this. I’m not getting a payout. I lost my job. I’m getting nothing. All I want is the truth.”



Doyle has denied any inappropriate conduct, and media reports, citing sources close to Doyle, have said he was blindsided by the allegations against him, believing he had done little beyond being too tactile and relaxed in his conversations.



Sullivan, 34, is a mix of vulnerability – breaking down several times during an interview with Guardian Australia – and steely determination.



The allegations against Doyle, Melbourne’s longest-serving mayor and a former leader of the state Liberal party, are the most serious in Australia since #MeToo led to scores of women alleging harassment in their workplaces.



Two other women are known to have made complaints against Doyle that are being investigated. The Greens councillor Cathy Oke says he groped her thigh under a table and, in a separate incident, tried to kiss her.



There is a second investigation into the allegations of “Carla”, who says Doyle, who was then the chairman of Melbourne Health, made persistent sexual remarks to her, and groped her leg under the table several times at a gala dinner in 2016.

Sullivan was the first to come forward, and she, perhaps naively, has been taken aback that it has been her reputation, her behaviour, that has been put under scrutiny along with Doyle’s. She has become obsessed with the case, anxious that it be finalised so that she, her husband, Brendan, and their three young children can move on with their lives.



The former Melbourne lord mayor, Robert Doyle, has denied all allegations. Photograph: Julian Smith/EPA

Sullivan was never interested in politics, she says. She was a lawyer keen to work in international humanitarian law. She first met Doyle in November 2013 when he attended the opening of an office building refurbishment that her husband, a property developer, was involved in.



The next day Doyle, through his assistant, requested to see her. He asked her to join the “Team Doyle” ticket for the council elections.



“He said, ‘I’ve looked you up, you’ve got the right pedigree and credentials, you’re a lawyer and a mother and a mediator and you’re exotic and good looking.’ ” He stressed that it was a bonus she didn’t have a political background.



It took several meetings and many months before Sullivan agreed to stand for election, but Doyle persisted. “He said, ‘You have a real chance to leave a legacy and to shape the city you love.’ It was right up my alley. I was someone who was disabled, was in a wheelchair for a long time [she has an autoimmune condition]. I grew up in Thailand surrounded by poverty and homelessness, and I really thought it will be a good contribution, it will make my children proud.”



The way Sullivan explains it, Doyle, 64, was physically affectionate with women, hugging and kissing them hello and goodbye in a way he did not do with men. At the beginning she found this unprofessional, but didn’t take it seriously and didn’t read it in a sexual way.



I reasoned that he was an old man who couldn’t possibly be interested in women my age Tessa Sullivan

In her 35-page statement of resignation, she says: “After a while I began to feel uncomfortable with how much he was touching me. He would hug me tightly, almost pushing my chest towards his. He would put his hand on my waist quite low on my hip. He would put his arm sideways around me and kiss me repeatedly on the forehead … and he would constantly reiterate to staff and councillors how special I was and how he would do anything for me.”



Sullivan tried not to worry: “I reasoned that he was an old man who couldn’t possibly be interested in women my age.” She found him “grotesque”.



There was a drinking culture at the council, with catered dinners after Tuesday night council meetings. Sullivan says that on about five occasions, Doyle offered her a lift home with him and his driver.



On 2 May last year, she says that when Doyle was being dropped off he opened the door beside her, put one of his arms around her neck and grabbed her right breast. She says she slapped his hand away and that Doyle looked shocked that she had done so.



She later told her husband about what had happened, but he suggested she give Doyle the benefit of the doubt, that perhaps it was an accident and he had had too much to drink.



For a time, Sullivan says, Doyle’s behaviour improved, but then it became worse and she wished she had complained about the incident in the car.



“I found Doyle’s behaviour more and more abhorrent,” she says in her resignation statement. “It got to a point where I was afraid to take my work jacket off as I knew he would look straight at my cleavage. I stopped wearing heels and regularly wore my glasses. I just started to blame myself and kept trying to change my appearance so he would just stop leering at me, but it never helped and he always did.”



She avoided Doyle whenever possible, but on 31 October last year she walked with him to the elevator that would take them to the car park. She said to Doyle, “I will go down with you,” meaning in the elevator. He said, “Will you just?” and followed up with “I love cunnilingus.” Sullivan says she began to panic and resisted persistent requests from Doyle to give her a lift home.



She says she told several councillors about Doyle’s behaviour, but implored them not to report it.



Although Sullivan says she tried to avoid Doyle as much as possible, she never told him to stop what he was doing. They never had a conversation about it. She says she doesn’t regret that.



“I did feel like I fought him off,” she says. “I feel like I didn’t flirt with him; I know I didn’t. I strongly believe just because a woman looks a certain way or that she’s friendly, doesn’t mean that he had any right to do what he did to me.



“What I really did think about [later] was … why did I walk up that hallway with him? Why did I get in the car? I know 100% that I didn’t invite him and I tried to avoid him.”







Doyle took a month’s leave when the council’s chief executive, Ben Rimmer, commissioned Dr Ian Freckelton QC to investigation the allegations, saying in a statement that he welcomed it “and will cooperate fully to clear my name”. He also said at the time that he was frustrated he had not been provided with the specific allegations “which have been strategically released to media, which is a denial of natural justice and clearly damaging to my reputation”.

On 30 January, Doyle was given a draft copy of the report and was given several days to respond. A few days later he resigned as mayor and as chairman of Melbourne Health, which runs the Royal Melbourne hospital.



A statement from his wife, Emma Page Campbell, said Doyle was “on the brink of being broken” and was in hospital suffering from anxiety and depression. His lawyer, Nick Ruskin, said Doyle “has been through a period which he feels has lacked any semblance of natural justice, where the burden of proof does not rest with proving guilt, but rather with proving innocence”.

Tessa Sullivan in her home: ‘I found Doyle’s behaviour more and more abhorrent.’ Photograph: Meredith O'Shea/The Guardian

Doyle’s illness presented Rimmer with a dilemma, causing a delay in releasing the report, or at least its findings, because Doyle had not responded to them. Weeks have gone by. Rimmer told a council meeting this week that the council’s legal advisers had provided Doyle with a “final opportunity” to respond to the draft interim report.

“The investigators will take into account any response received from Mr Doyle,” he said. “Following this the city of Melbourne’s lawyers will provide me with the finalised interim report and I will make necessary decisions regarding the release of information, if at all possible.”

A spokeswoman for Doyle’s public relations firm said she was not authorised to say anything beyond that the former mayor remains “very unwell”.

Sullivan has asked for, and been denied, access to the report. She wants it released as soon as possible and fears that it will not be.

For her, the past three months have been nightmarish. Early in January, the Herald Sun published a large photograph of her in a bikini on its front page, with the headline “Rob, I’m so lucky to have you”. The photo was taken by her husband when they were holidaying with their children during a US summer, and sent to several councillors with a jokey message about the weather in Melbourne.



The unrelated text about “lucky to have you” was sent to Doyle several months later, when she was worried that a journalist had published her address. Doyle, she says, was supportive, saying he knew many journalists and “had the Herald Sun wrapped around his little finger”. She had thanked him. “I felt like he was protecting me and my family from having something happen to us by having our address published.”



The texts, including one where she called Doyle “darl” and another where she said she was “devastated” that he couldn’t attend a Christmas lunch for councillors she had organised, gave the impression that at the time Sullivan said she was being harassed by Doyle, she was also friendly with him. She says they were selective and taken out of context and in breach of the inquiry’s request that parties did not engage with the media.



She was questioned about the texts at the inquiry after the Herald Sun story appeared, and gathered 14 months of phone records to show that she wasn’t infatuated with Doyle but had normal professional contact with him.



The Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, with Robert Doyle. Photograph: Joe Castro/AAP

On the day the story was published, Sullivan and her family were at a beach house, which they had rented because she says the media were often camped outside their Toorak home.



“They [journalists] were calling us 50 to 80 times a day,” she says. “We’d moved three times at this point. We went to live with my mum, and we had rented this beach house twice. I remember coming out and I saw my husband – he was on the patio, and I remember he was on the phone and it looked like he’d just heard that someone had died or something.”



The Herald Sun has defended its coverage, denying it had run stories leaked by Doyle’s supporters to discredit Sullivan.



On Monday, after Sullivan had tweeted several criticisms of the Herald Sun, accusing it of “victim blaming at its worst”, its editor, Damon Johnston, told Guardian Australia that the paper stood by its coverage, including publishing the texts. “We have sought to give readers the arguments from all parties, as far as possible, rather than giving just one side, in order to provide readers with a balanced coverage of the scandal,” he said.



But by Wednesday the Herald Sun had pulled stories damaging to Sullivan, and the bikini photo. Johnston says it had done so after a request from Sullivan. “As an act of good faith, we agreed to remove them.”



We have played by the rules, we have done everything that we were supposed to do Tessa Sullivan

Sullivan is contemptuous, believing it has more to do with threatened defamation action than good faith. “I tried everything to get them to see the truth. I sent them legal letters. I went to the press council, the Victorian equal opportunity and human rights commission. And they just blanked us, they didn’t respond, they did nothing. And then today they take it down.”



Now Sullivan wants it all over. She doesn’t regret lodging a formal complaint, but had no idea the experience would be so horrendous. She has recently begun seeing a counsellor. Through her lawyer she has requested a meeting with Rimmer and for her to be able to see the report, but so far that has been declined.



“The council’s not giving me anything,” she says. “Doyle’s trying not to put the report out there, at the same time it’s been 10 weeks of me waiting, and copping it from the Herald Sun and not being able to correct the facts.



“We have played by the rules, we have done everything that we were supposed to do, submitted evidence to the investigators, undertook hours and hours of interviews.

“Now I just want the truth to come out and I want justice to be done.”