Prisoner: Cell Block H actress Maggie Kirkpatrick has had her convictions for molesting a 14-year-old more than 30 years ago overturned.
The Australian actress, 74, broke down in tears when the Victoria County Court upheld her appeal against two convictions for indecently assaulting the troubled girl in 1984 and one count of gross indecency.
She played sadistic prison warden "The Freak" in the Prisoner, as it was known in Australia, and the series ran from 1979 to 1986.
Kirkpatrick sobbed as she hugged supporters after learning her convictions were overturned.
"It's been rather difficult, but I'm very happy with the result," she told reporters outside court.
Sydney-based Kirkpatrick met the victim at a Melbourne psychiatric hospital where the girl had been treated for substance abuse and a personality disorder.
The victim, now a 45-year-old mother of three, first went to police in 2013.
Kirkpatrick told her appeal hearing that she had invited the girl home for dinner to give a disturbed person "a little home life".
Judge Geoffrey Chettle said that in 1984 the complainant was "clearly vulnerable and unstable," and that she was a careful and consistent witness, but her evidence was not independently supported, the judge said.
He concluded that he was not satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the offending had occurred.
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