A woman who relived her childhood molestation through two trials as the abuser successfully appealed his first conviction has told a Napier court of the lifelong impact, including making herself fat to avoid being regarded as sexually attractive.
It came in a victim impact statement read on her behalf by a victim's advisor yesterday in Napier District Court where William John Ross, now in his late 60s, was sentenced to four years and six months' jail on one charge of attempted to rape the woman's sister and concurrent terms of 18 months for indecently assaulting each of them.
Ross had denied the offending and according to Judge Geoff Rea mounted a defence claiming the women's claims of where offences happened meant they could not have occurred.
Neither complainant was in court for the sentencing, but in the victim impact statement one said that since the abuse when she was just eight years old she had spent over 30 years struggling with relationships, including not trusting men, and had deliberately over-eaten to make herself fat so that she wouldn't appear sexually attractive.
The woman said she did not tell anyone what had happened in the offences in the early 1980s, even having known what her sister was subjected to as she sat in the man's lap.