Jessica Camilleri, the deranged female prisoner jailed for beheading her own mother, has launched a terrifying attack on another inmate after ‘fixating on her dark hair and trying to scalp her’, the woman’s lawyer has claimed.

But it was her alleged victim, Lien Nguyen, who found herself on trial this week – accused of attacking 31‑year‑old Camilleri as payback for having a clump of her hair violently torn out in the kitchen of Dillwynia women’s prison last year.

During a hearing on Wednesday at Penrith Local Court, where Nguyen faced assault charges over the alleged revenge attack, Camilleri made several extraordinary claims about her life behind bars.

In one bizarre moment, she declared that ‘everyone knows who… Jessica Camilleri is’, adding: ‘From the beginning of my sentence, when I told them what I’d done, the girls said, “Anyone who chopped her mother’s head off deserves to rot.”‘

Camilleri had been due to appear in person but eventually appeared via AVL from Silverwater, one of several facilities she has been moved between since being locked up in 2019 and convicted of manslaughter.

Magistrate Stephen Corry had asked for the two women to be brought up from the cells below separately, and Nguyen was secured in the Perspex and wooden dock.

Nguyen’s lawyer Mark Davis had advised the magistrate that Camilleri was inclined to attack without warning and he would not feel comfortable if she walked behind him to the witness box.

When she eventually appeared via video link, Camilleri repeatedly asked to have her ‘charges dismissed under the Mental Health Act’ – only to be told she was a witness, not the defendant – and several times replied ‘no comment’ under cross-examination by the defendant’s lawyer.

At times, Camilleri seemed confused about which prison assault was before the court, and claimed she believed a group of seven female inmates was conspiring to portray her as ‘crazy’ so she would be transferred to a psychiatric hospital. 

She also expressed concern that she would end up like ‘Katherine Knight, never to be released’. Knight is serving a full life sentence for murdering her partner, skinning his body and cooking up body parts to eat.

‘All the other girls I was physically fighting against were a long time trying to set me up so I could retaliate,’ said Camilleri, who was dressed in prison greens with her hair drawn up in a bun. 

‘The girls baited me… because they wanted to convince the society I was crazy. [They] wanted to convince the world I’m completely unstable.

‘The fight happened over something that was a planned set-up… so I could go to Long Bay Hospital, to use psychotic treatment on me so I could never get out of jail.’

Mr Davis said his client was ‘terrified’ of Camilleri, who had been let out of a psych ward to ‘reintegrate’ with other prisoners when the attack took place.

Before the attempted scalping, Camilleri had waited until up to five prison officers went to lunch together, leaving the inmates alone and unsupervised in a section of Dillwynia.

In confronting prison CCTV of the attack – which happened about 11.30am on February 15, 2025, when female inmates including Nguyen were playing bingo in the U-Bloc protection wing – Camilleri could be seen sneaking up behind Nguyen, who was sitting at a table.

Camilleri, who has lost a significant amount of weight during her incarceration, grabbed Nguyen’s hair and yanked it back sharply, with the older woman partly saved from greater injury because her chair collapsed beneath her as she fell to the ground.

Nguyen then retaliated, kicking and hitting Camilleri as other inmates tried to break the two up. Finally, Nguyen grabbed a milk crate and began attacking Camilleri with it.

The large group of women prisoners on the scene then screamed ‘guards! guards!’ but it took officers 10 minutes to arrive.

Nguyen said she was just playing the game when she felt her hair pulled. ‘I was sitting there playing bingo, I didn’t expect to be scalped, pulled down by her full weight. The girls picked up my hair and said, “Oh, my God – she’s trying to scalp you.”‘

She is in custody awaiting sentencing on unrelated firearms and drug charges.

She appeared before Magistrate Corry, as did Camilleri to give evidence as Nguyen’s victim in the alleged retaliatory assault.

Nguyen was found guilty of the charge of common assault against Camilleri, with Mr Corry rejecting the argument she had acted in self-defence.

Mr Corry said that after the initial assault of Camilleri pulling Nguyen’s hair, Camilleri had ‘distanced herself’ and ‘didn’t constitute a threat to anyone’.

It was Nguyen, he said, who had moved towards Camilleri and assaulted her. As punishment, she was sentenced to an additional month in prison.

Nguyen’s lawyer Mr Davis also criticised prison authorities after he said officers had not been supervising Camilleri.

‘To leave a psychotic woman with a proclivity to attacking prisoners and to attacking staff .. was inviting bloodshed and mayhem,’ he said.

It comes after the Daily Mail revealed that Camilleri – who decapitated her mother Rita on the night of July 20, 2019, after a fight over a Red Rooster takeaway order – was bragging about her ghastly crime to terrorise other women behind bars, and had even threatened to behead fellow prisoners just like she did her mother.

Camilleri is due to be sentenced this month on one count of assault occasioning actual bodily harm of a fellow inmate, and two offences of assaulting prison officers in May 2025.

It’s the fourth time since entering custody that she has been charged with ripping chunks of hair from officers’ scalps. Graphic videos of the attacks, which left the victims with bald patches and psychological scars, were previously shown in court.

Nguyen will be sentenced in April for possession of a shortened firearm, dealing with property believed to be proceeds of crime between $5,000 and $100,000, five counts of supplying a prohibited drug, and one count of supplying a commercial quantity of a prohibited drug.