How Rachel Carling-Jenkins found out about her husband's child porn stash on home laptop

Australian MP Rachel Carling-Jenkins has revealed details on her husband's hidden child porn stash, and the moment she and her son found out about his double life.

Dr Carling-Jenkins will appear on tonight's episode of Australian TV programme Insight on SBS after her ex-husband Gary Jenkins was convicted for child porn offences last year.

Australian Conservatives member Dr Carling-Jenkins made an emotional declaration in Parliament to the upper house in September, 18 months after initially reporting to police, revealing the details around his addiction, and how he kept images within the family home.

She said on finding the vile material with her teenage son she left the family home immediately and the marriage ended.

During Tuesday's episode, Dr Carling-Jenkins reveals how she met her ex-husband online and when they fell in love.

"I met Gary online on a Christian cafe site," she told Insight host Jenny Brockie.

"I was in my late 20s, I was a single mum with a little boy, and I was looking for the next stage in my life.

"We corresponded for a few months. I was living in Queensland at the time, and we met

in Melbourne when I came for a conference and we really clicked.

"We dated for about six months and then we were engaged for six months and got married."

Dr Carling-Jenkins said what originally attracted her to Mr Jenkins was his gentle nature, and that he was a religious man, and that their 10 year marriage was "fairly normal".

"I was looking for a Christian man, everything that I was looking for in a man, Gary came across with those qualities," she explained.

"We attempted to have children, we weren't able to so we worked through those kinds of issues as a couple. We built a house together. I felt we were building a life together."

Despite what she felt was an ordinary marriage, Dr Carling-Jenkins said in hindsight that her ex-husband did have some abnormalities in his personality.

"He told me exactly what I wanted to hear ... I realise now that I was being played," she said.

"I wondered if he was ill. I wondered if he was just not very well. He'd left a job and I wondered after that that he hadn't coped very well and that he wasn't very well, perhaps he was depressed. I did think that for a while."

On February 26, 2016, Dr Carling-Jenkins removed herself from the public hearings she was attending at Parliament House in Melbourne when all the ministers broke for lunch. The 42-year-old drove 23km to her home, and with the help of her teenage son Terry, the pair logged on to her husband's computer.

"I thought I might find pornography," she said.

"I was always completely against that and it's something I said right from the beginning, before I marry Gary, that pornography was a no go zone for me."

But what Dr Carling-Jenkins and her son found on the device was far worse than anything she'd anticipated.

"I actually found many, many images of child pornography, of child abuse material," she said.

"I saw a number of icons on the screen, and I could see small images. So some were photos, some were videos and I started to click on them to see what it was and they were all of children and all of little girls. I saw child rape."

Last year Victorian MP Rachel Carling-Jenkins joined Senator Cory Bernardi's Australian Conservatives. Photo / AAP

Dr Carling-Jenkins said the moment she registered what had been uncovered on her ex-husband's laptop, she broke in to "hysterics"

"I did not understand," she said.

"This did not gel with the man I had married. This was just beyond my comprehension; beyond anything I had ever anticipated viewing."

Mr Jenkins, a 46-year-old telecommunications technician, was sentenced to four months' jail in March 2017 for knowingly possessing child pornography. He will be required to report to Victoria Police for the next eight years after he was placed on the Sex Offenders Register.

But Dr Carling-Jenkins said that after she reported her husband to police, and he was arrested and found guilty — she cut off all contact.

"I wasn't interested in speaking to him after that," she said.

"He phoned me on the day he was arrested and even then when he said I've got something to tell you, I just said I know and I'm not coming home."

Dr Carling-Jenkins said that her ex-husband's family and friends — whom she was very close with — didn't respond well when she reported him and left their marriage.

"I was very close to his family," she said.

"[But] I haven't had a lot of contact with them that's been civil since. There was a real sense among family and friends that I should have stayed, that a wife stays, that I should have tried to help him through this because it must have been a difficult time for him. I just wanted to say it's a lot worse time for those little girls and there were a lot of excuses made.

"I think it's going to be hard for me to ever trust another man again ... and I can't see that really in my future to be honest at this stage, two years later.

"The thing that I find the hardest now is the images of the children that I saw. So I will still be triggered when I'm in a shopping centre or walking down the street and I see a little girl with particular colour hair or a particular look on her face, that will trigger some of the images that I saw and that's something that I think will take a lot longer to work through."