The woman who was sexually assaulted as a child for years by former Labor Party secretary Kent Rowe has told the NT Supreme Court she is “serving a life sentence” for the crimes he committed against her.

The victim was given permission by Chief Justice Michael Grant to read an emotional statement in the Supreme Court Thursday during sentencing submissions for Kent Rowe, who was last month convicted of six counts of sexual intercourse without consent.

She said she remained deeply affected by the impact of Rowe’s actions and that the burden on her remains.

“I’m learning to be proud of myself, but the truth is, my life has been one of so much unfulfilled potential,” she said.

“I am so angry that not only have I had to live with the impacts of those crimes, [but] that I’ve been the one to carry the burden of this alone.”

The woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, said she had been made to feel like “an accomplice to my own sexual assaults” after confronting Rowe about the abuse in recent years and that the ongoing sexual abuse over many years left her “scared to fall asleep at night”.

“There isn’t any sentence that will give back what was taken from me or rewrite my past,” she said.

“For these crimes I am serving a life sentence and there is no getting out of that.

“I can still feel what he did to me … in vivid details and during my most intimate moments it comes back to haunt me.”

The woman also told the court the multiple sexual assaults had left her with post traumatic stress disorder, leading her to engage in self-harm at times.

Rowe ran the Territory Labor Party as secretary for nearly a decade and led the party to election victory in 2016 and 2020.

During the trial, the court heard that Rowe’s wife, Darwin alderman Rebecca Want de Rowe, had learned of the rape allegations in 2018, the same year Rowe left the role of party secretary and went to work for Labor-aligned marketing company Campaign Edge Sprout.

Rowe held a lead role and was credited by party insiders with Labor’s 2020 election victory that saw him promoted into then-chief minister Michael Gunner’s inner sanctum of top advisers.

He was forced to resign from the high-profile position in February last year, after lying about his involvement in Labor’s cocaine sex scandal and an extra-marital affair with a local sex worker.

Crown prosecutor Tami Grealy told the court on Thursday that the prosecution would be seeking a minimum five-year jail sentence for Rowe’s rape convictions and that he had showed a lack of remorse by fighting the charges in court.

Rowe’s lawyer Jon Tippett argued that Rowe should be given home detention because the prosecution’s case failed to show he was a “risk to the community”.

Chief Justice Grant reserved his sentencing decision to next month.