"I'm not explaining this well, but honestly I think MLV and the victim are actually both victims in this and ultimately, there really are no winners."
This.
None of us were in court. We don't know what happened. In cases like this, the reporting is subject to a lot of restrictions, so none of us can know what evidence was adduced or how convincing it was, and therefore can't have a meaningful opinion of the jury's verdict. In which case, the obvious conclusion is that the verdict was sensible, in the absence of any reasonable evidence otherwise.
Crucial material, such as how much contact was known to have occurred between the alleged victim and the alleged perpetrator, presumably would identify the alleged victim and therefore cannot be reported. But clearly, before you can sexually assault someone, you need to be in the same postcode as them, and I don't think the evidence of that, whatever it might have been, was reported.
If an adult had had regular unsupervised access to a child, and there was evidence of that, and there wasn't an obvious reason for the contact, then the jury might have had more to think about if it was claimed that the adult used that time to abuse the child. But if there wasn't evidence of them actually spending time together, the issue of what they did while they were together might not even arise, and hence the jury would not spend very long deliberating.