A SMALL-time actor who played a trooper in Ned Kelly will see the other side of justice today when he is jailed for rape.
Michael McLindon, 30, has been warned by a Melbourne judge to expect a significant jail term for spiking a woman`s drink and then raping her.
A jury found that McLindon, who also appeared on Home and Away and has worked as a nurse, raped his victim at her Thornbury home early on February 16, 2006.
In a victim impact statement read to the County Court, the woman, 21, said it was telling that McLindon did not even close the front door when he left her naked.
"He saw me as nothing - I was not even worth shutting the door for."
She said the rape had made her very angry.
"Sometimes I hated the world so much I wanted to die. He took away my dignity. I can`t understand how one human being could do that to another," she said.
"Since being raped I have been fighting an uphill battle just to get my life back on track."
Prosecutor Tim Walsh said McLindon or an accomplice gave the woman a drug or drug cocktail that made her feel tired and disoriented and probably rendered her incapable of resistance.
Blood analysis later found traces of morphine.
The woman had met McLindon and his cousins at the Northcote Social Club and went with them to a series of bars, ending up at a Crown casino bar.
She began to feel drowsy and asked to go home. The court heard that in the taxi she felt "really weird and out of it" and, on reaching home, went to bed.
Mr Walsh said she later woke and could see McLindon on top of her.
McLindon, of Torquay, pleaded not guilty to rape and administering a drug to enable sexual penetration. He has been on remand since November after an adjournment and the death of the trial judge.
Defence counsel Bruce Nibbs told Judge Duncan Allen yesterday that McLindon had turned to alcohol to solve his problems, and was affected by it on a night on which he committed crimes that were out of character.
He had been suspended from his job at a nursing home and had lost his registration, but had good prospects of rehabilitation, Mr Nibbs said.
The court heard McLindon almost died of malaria after going to Uganda for a month to nurse.
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