Madeleine West agreed to a police sting to catch her abuser. Then her body began to shut down

It wasn’t the time to nod off. Madeleine West was wired up and on her way to trap the man who had abused her as a child into a secretly recorded confession when her body began to shut down.

She knew it might happen. Trauma hijacks us in different ways; for West, it’s a physical dissociation, known as the dorsal vagal or freeze response. Once she’d summoned the courage to agree to the police sting, knowing it might turn a strong prosecution case into a water-tight one, she spent months preparing to deal with the physical and emotional challenge it would pose, by focusing on strategies – breathing, the Alexander technique, meditation – to help her stay present in her body.

But that morning in the car, sitting next to the detective who was running the case, the physical shutdown began. “I was falling asleep,” recalls the actress and child protection advocate, who has joined parenting expert Maggie Dent in a new online safety coalition, Ctrl+Shift. “The detective said to me, ‘Madeleine, you’re an actor. Just act. Pretend that you’re someone who’s been wronged, and you’re going to seek justice for everyone’. And I went, ‘that’s something I can do. I can act’.”

West is telling me this story on a gusty winter’s day over lunch at Bellevue, a French restaurant on Woolloomooloo wharf. She spoons the broth of her seafood bouillabaisse with one hand and uses the other to cradle her six-month-old baby, whose sleepy serenity betrays no hint of the grizzling that kept its mother awake half the night. It’s West’s seventh child, a pre-menopausal surprise who arrived soon after her 47th birthday.

Her bouillabaisse is almost gone and my sea bass with fennel and caviar is long demolished by the time I confess, with a little embarrassment, that I used to watch West on Neighbours in the early 2000s. She played Dee Bliss, the doomed wife of Toadfish Rebecchi (he accidentally drove her over a cliff), and I was a fledgling journalist who should have been doing more constructive things with her time. I remember thinking, even back then, that there was something fragile about the young actress, who was so skinny and pale and pretty.

Her vulnerability may have been clear to the viewer, but she hid it from herself. “Push it down, push it down,” she recalls. Still, it had been lurking, taking various shapes; she’d struggled with an eating disorder, and she now believes her decision to become an actor arose from her desire to be “anyone but myself”. “It became my safe place – hiding, walking in someone else’s shoes, inhabiting someone else’s skin, just for a brief moment, where I didn’t have to be that damaged, dirty little girl who I just despised.”

Trauma has a mind of its own, though, and it was motherhood that brought West’s thrashing to the surface; seeing herself as a child in the vulnerability of her children. “It becomes like a white noise,” she says. “It’s an undercurrent in every moment of your waking life, and even in your sleep. I can’t even find an adequate metaphor for when these memories want out. It’s almost like giving birth, because it’s painful, and they suddenly come out fully formed. It’s like looking at a clip for a film.”

Her abuser had been a childhood neighbour, and there were still connections. While the white noise was growing louder, she learnt that he had grandchildren. “For me that was the deciding factor,” she says. “I called the police.” She began working with the Victorian detective, who “was so tender and gentle in his ministrations”, she says, “that for the first time I felt genuinely believed.” His belief made her think that, perhaps, justice was possible.

She remembers the detective flying to Byron Bay, where she now lives, to interview her. Rather than stifling them, she allowed her memories to flow. “It was so specific,” she says, of her memories of one assault. “I was wearing a white dress with coloured coconuts, and I was sunburned because we had the swimming carnival that day. I was in a bad mood because I’d saved my donut for my dad, and he didn’t want it. They wanted to go to a party at Peter’s, and I didn’t want to go. I could feel the scratchiness of the dress on my skin.”

She worked with the detective for five years, using her knowledge of the perpetrator and his social network to help track down other victims. Several agreed to be part of the investigation. The police asked her to visit him, wearing a wire. “I went, ‘I can’t do it, I can’t do it, I can’t do it’ … and then one day I just flipped,” she says. “I thought, actually, if anyone is going to be able to do this, it’s going to be me. At the moment, he’s still free. If he manages to abuse more kids, I’ll never forgive myself.”

So there she was, fighting a trauma-fuelled shutdown in the police car that morning before being roused by the detective’s pep talk. She knocked on the door. Peter Vincent White, in his early 70s, and his wife answered in their dressing gowns. She told them she was in the neighbourhood, had remembered they were close to her family when she was a child, and was hoping to get their advice on some difficulties in her life. They ushered her in. But for a moment, her abuser let his mask slip. “His facial expression … was one of absolute shock. Then he put a smile on.”

His wife went to get dressed, and West told White that she’d had trouble in her life, with her relationships and sense of self, and she thought it “really leads back to the relationship we had”, she said. She told him it wasn’t good for her, the way he touched her, and she needed to have that acknowledged. White began to cry, telling her he was sorry, he didn’t remember, he must have blacked it out. When she returned to the police car, “I literally just collapsed,” she says.

In late 2023, White pleaded guilty to 33 child abuse offences, including gross indecency, indecent assault and sexual penetration of a child between 1977 and 1998. He was sentenced to 15 years. West read her victim’s impact statement in court. “It was like upending the jigsaw puzzle of my life, and for the first time, being able to piece the pieces together, and the final piece was being able to stand up and address it to him,” she says. “To be able to say to him, ‘I’ve borne a cross that was not of my making, and I’m dropping that now, and I’m giving it to you, where you can take it back to your prison cell and make your own hell’. To be able to say that was life-changing.”

All this was happening when her children were young. For a while, she had six children under the age of eight, including twins. The diabolical thing about trauma is that victims can’t pick when it bubbles to the surface. The vulnerability of early motherhood is often the trigger – the fear that it will happen to their own children, and the realisation that it couldn’t have been their fault.

All that makes it hard to be a present, calm mother. “It turned into intergenerational trauma,” West says. “Despite my best intentions, to some degree I’ve traumatised my own children by carrying the damage he [gave] me, and whether that was being overbearing and overprotective, or whether I was vaguing out or going into dorsal vagal or fight or flight, in which case I couldn’t function effectively.

“I’ve always felt that I’ve done my very best to be a present mother. But when you’re labouring under a trauma episode triggered by somebody, you don’t even know what it is in that moment.”

Her children know, in age-appropriate ways, what happened to her. It’s part of how she protects them. “Just to have the sensibility – this is so important in digital safety – that if something bad happens to you … if anything makes you feel funny, if anybody makes you feel a bit awkward, come to me and we can make you feel better,” she says.

The opportunity to address her abuser was liberating, says West. The trauma didn’t go away. But it allowed her to turn it into something more meaningful. She now teaches parents, children and educators about being safe online, and is trained to spot potential victims.

“That’s become my mission, and I hope, to some degree, my legacy,” she says. “I do believe that at some stage we will be called to account by the young people who follow us to say, what did you do? And I like to think that I’ll be able to hold my head high and say, having experienced it personally, I did everything I could to ensure it didn’t happen to others.”

Ctrl+Shift is a coalition led by West, Dent, Safe on Social founder Kirra Pendergast, and screen addiction expert Brad Marshall. It runs workshops, seminars, programs on digital ethics, and offers online safety coaching.

“The online space is still seen as predominantly harmless,” says West. “That sensibility that it’s on the other side of the screen. [Parents] think they know what their kids are doing. They have absolutely no idea. When I talk to little ones, eight-year-olds, [I ask] who’s seen something scary? All the hands. Who told mummy? Maybe one. Why? Because she’ll take away my device.

“By threatening to do that, we curtail the opportunity for a child to make a disclosure. So they keep going and they’re navigating things and clicking on things.”

I ask her how she approaches screen time as a mother of seven (the twins, the youngest of her six children with former husband, chef Shannon Bennett, are now 10). She gives her kids set times – she believes it’s unrealistic to stop them going online – and tries to make it meaningful. She has learnt how to play her son’s favourite games, so they can use that time to connect, and recently had her kids plan a garage sale online; they designed signs, looked up recipes for treats to sell, and used Google Maps to work out where to hang the posters for maximum effect. “It takes effort,” she says. “There’s no such thing as set and forget.”

West is finishing her bouillabaisse, and bub is beginning to stir. There are so many things I want to ask her, and not enough time before her flight home to northern NSW. We briefly touch on a few; she tells me about the time, towards the end of her stint on Neighbours, when she was hit by a bus while crossing Oxford Street. Like something out of a soap plot line, she had temporary amnesia (as well as broken teeth, skull fractures and her wallet stolen) and lay in emergency as a Jane Doe until her agent realised she was missing and rang around looking for her.

And the time, too, when she delivered her seventh baby by caesarean, that the epidural did not work, and she felt the whole thing. “When they did the ice test, I could feel it. And I think that they thought, oh, that’s perhaps just a projection that you’re feeling it,” she says.

She alerted them again when they were cutting her, by which time it was too late to re-administer the epidural. Her only option was a general anesthetic, which she refused. “I needed to hear my baby’s first cry,” she says. “It’s possibly one of the most traumatic things I’ve ever been through.”

Her ashen-faced anaesthetist apologised to her afterwards. The acknowledgement helped. “I think that’s true of anything,” she says, “any traumatic experience – just having it acknowledged is key.”

West should know. She’s dealt with more trauma than most. It never goes away, but she’s no longer fragile. She strides off into the afternoon pushing her Bugaboo pram, with the quiet confidence of a woman who has conquered demons.

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