"I didn’t stop screaming": Sandra Sully recalls horrifying gun attack

Veteran Ten newsreader Sandra Sully has opened up about the horrifying gun attack she endured back in 1997 in the latest episode of the Stellar Something To Talk About podcast.

Sully was held at gunpoint as she was returning from from a late news shift in November 1997. 

She was getting out of her car a little after midnight when she was attacked by a masked assailant who tried to push her back into the car. There was a struggle and the assailant put a gun to her temple and pulled the trigger twice, but fortunately, it failed to go off. 

Sully kept screaming until her attacker eventually fled the scene, and the attack was kept a secret from the public for 20 years. 

The newsreader returned to work just a few weeks later. 

“Because I was doing night shifts, I had a security detail for 10 years every night when I got home and that gave me real comfort,”  she revealed on the podcast. 

She believed that her screams saved her life, recalling: “It did save me. I really believe that. It was funny, I had a dream as a young woman most of my life about a really frightening experience and that I would be trying to scream and nothing would come out.” 

“And at the time I remember screaming and I was shocked that it was coming out, and I knew, I found out within a day or two that the people next door had called the police and because I didn’t stop screaming despite him pistol-whipping me, he ran.

"That was the only thing that saved me. I was lucky. Because he had a gun, balaclava and handcuffs. So he meant business.”

Sully had previously told Stellar that it took her a long time to process what had happened and open up about the ordeal publicly. 

“It was at least 10 years before I was ready to talk about it to anyone other than my family, and probably 15 years before I felt like I could put it behind me,” she said in the 2017 interview. 

“I still don’t like to be surprised. If someone makes a loud noise, I jump. I am always aware in a carpark.”

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