Anthony Sampieri has been sentenced to life in prison after being found guilty of kidnapping and raping a 7-year-old girl in the toilet of a Sydney dance studio in 2018.

The son of the man who raped a young girl in a Sydney dance studio has apologised for the horrific crime his father committed.

Anthony Sampieri was sentenced to life in jail today, with hugs and claps at the Downing Centre District Court as the sentence was handed down.

Judge Paul Conlon did not set a non-parole period, which means the 56-year-old will die in jail.

After hearing the news Sampieri’s son Daniel told the Daily Mail he was relieved to hear of his father’s sentence and that he was “devastated” to be related to him.

The 26-year-old also issued an apology to the girl on behalf of his own family.

“I have something to say to all of them: I feel completely devastated that I am related to this person and I am so sorry for what he did to that young kid,” he told the publication.

“There is nothing I can do to make it better but I just want them to know that I’m thinking of them.”

Daniel last spoke with his dad months before the sickening attack and was previously estranged from him for years.

“You can’t fix someone like that, he was too far gone,” he said.

“They say if a dog gets blooded it’s really hard to bring them back, and that’s the way I see him.”

There were tears in court this morning as the judge read out the horrific details of the attack, in which Sampieri bound and raped a seven-year-old girl inside a Kogarah dance studio.

This was followed by hugs and an mass intake of breath as the sentence was read. Outside court, one of the heroes who tried to stop the attack Nick Gilio, said he couldn’t believe his ears when he heard the sentence.

He expected Sampieri would get a lot less.

“Life is life, let’s get him away from innocent victims and good people in general,” he said. “This is a society we want to be living in, void of these cowards. This is a bit of closure for everyone.”

However, the court heard Sampieri, who has liver cancer, has only a 60 per cent chance of surviving the next five years.

Hero dentist Jeffrey Stack, 59, who also intervened in the attack alluded to this outside court saying, “mother nature will sort him out before his term ends”.

However, he thanked Judge Conlon for giving Sampieri an “unprecedented” sentence for a crime of this nature, which he hoped would act as a deterrent.

Sampieri arrived early this morning from his isolation cell in Long Bay wearing a green jump suit.

He sat looking forlorn as Judge Conlon read the details of the attack over 40 minutes.

The judge said Sampieri showed a “complete lack of empathy for the child” and had a “callous disregard” for her in the attack.

He said what happened was “any parent’s worst nightmare”.

“One can only imagine the confusion and heightened state of fear she would have been in as he subjected her to sexual abuse of the most horrifying and degrading kind,” Judge Conlon said.

He said the attack will have lifelong consequences for the victim, saying she will be scared of using public toilets and even the toilet in her own home.

The court heard that when Sampieri had been captured, he was lying in a pool of his own blood and told police when they arrived: “I was shooting up and he’s come in, beat me up and stolen my meth”.

Meanwhile, the families of the men who tried to stop the attack wiped tears away from their eyes.

The judge said to hero Mr Gilio who tried to stop the attack: “Only due to your selfless intervention, the victim, her family, the dance school and community are in deficit to you, for the courage you displayed in detaining the offender.”

In addition to the rape charges, Sampieri pleaded guilty to making 94 lewd phone calls to victims aged 18-82 between August and November 2018.

The judge warned “the risk of reoffending looms large” for Sampieri, saying the 56-year-old will “remain a future danger”.

The 56-year-old has pleaded guilty to 10 charges related to the attack including three counts of sexual intercourse with a child under 10. He’s also admitted to charges related to sexually explicit and harassing phone calls he made to women in the months before the Kogarah attack.

Sampieri was heckled as he walked into the court on Friday last week, with a member of the public gallery heard saying: “There he is, the little piece of s**t."

Sampieri – who was on parole at the time for a Wollongong rape – raped, punched and bound the girl in the dance studio toilets after consuming the drug ice.

“Using crystal meth I believe that led me to what I did,” Sampieri told the court last week.

The court heard how he believed ice was a “sexual drug” and his deviant behaviour and meth abuse went “hand-in-hand”.

Prosecutor Sally Traynor said he had left written notes in his house with reminders like“don’t do drugs”, “don’t use masturbation as a method to relieve loneliness” and “don’t watch hardcore pornography”.

However, Sampieri told the court those notes were the “last thing” on his mind when he attacked the young girl.

“I’d reached a point where the stuff I’d carried in my thinking started to really change and it’s not good,” he said.

In the lead-up to the Wollongong rape, he had made a string of offensive phone calls for sexual gratification, giving him a feeling of power and control. He also admitted he had repeatedly injected ice in nearby public toilets before the attack.

He said he was in such a state of sexual excitement by the time he was in the dance studio facilities, he would have attacked anyone who had walked in.

In the 48 hours leading up to that, the court heard Sampieri went on an ice binge around Kogarah that saw him visit a beauticians the day before the attack.

The court heard he injected ice at a number of toilets in the suburb, including at a child psychologists, a library and a dentists.

Sampieri told police he injected more ice when he arrived at the dance studio where the attack took place on November 15. He said he stumbled across the studio when he was looking for somewhere to “shoot up”.

Asked why he filmed his offending that night he told the court, “because I had the means to do it and I had that much crystal meth that it seemed the best thing to do at the time”.

However, the crown said his actions that day were planned, not impulsive, and that he filmed the attack for his own gratification.

“The offender was looking for some kind of sexual gratification and filming women was not enough, he had to attack someone to fulfil his sexual desires,” the prosecutor said.