The man has interim name suppression and faces three representative charges of indecent assault with a girl aged between 12 and 16, and one of rape. The offences are said to have occurred between early 1979 and late 1980.
The complainant, now 50, said she met him through a mutual sporting interest. The indecencies happened at a sporting venue near her family home. She would have been 10 or 11. Under cross-examination she confirmed that meant the years involved would have been 1977 and 1978.
She said the man “groomed” her for about two years, then in 1980 when she started high school aged 13, he began having regular sexual intercourse with her at his home near her school.
She would go there, and he would motion from a window whether it was safe for her to come in and whether his partner was out.
The woman said it was like being under his spell. She kept going back because he made her feel special and wanted. But he had destroyed her sense of self-worth and her life was crumbling.
She was in trouble at school and with police. By 14 she had moved out of her good family home and her life from then on spiralled out of control. Now, aged 50, she wanted the man she believed was responsible held to account.
Explaining the charges to the jury at the start of the trial, prosecutor Clayton Walker said the rape charge related to the first time the man allegedly had sex with the girl. Although the complainant alleged regular sexual intercourse occurred, those further incidents could be considered consensual.
Statutory time expiredThe statutory time allowed to lay any charge alleging consensual sexual intercourse with a girl under 16 was one year and that time had, of course, expired.
Taking the witness stand yesterday, the man relied on old photos and diaries kept by his former partner’s father, who owned the house where the alleged behaviour took place, to pour doubt on the allegations.
An old advertisement he produced for the court showed he was living at an out-of-town location until March or April 1979, he said.
The diaries showed he lived at the house where the woman claimed the sexual intercourse took place — not for two years, as she said, but for nine months and only until March 1980.
By July 1980 he was staying with a friend and had begun a new relationship. Photographs thereafter showed him at his new girlfriend’s house.
He did not go to the sporting venue in the girl’s neighbourhood until after May 1979 – when he started a new job and met a man who also used the facility. That man was now dead.
During cross-examination, Mr Walker referred to other diary entries not relied on by Mr Simperingham. Those additional entries implied the man was still regularly at the house even after he moved out, Mr Walker said.
He had a key and might even have been still involved with the occupier.
The man said he and the occupier had remained good friends but there was no ongoing romantic relationship between them.
It was true the woman’s father was not happy he had hurt his daughter by leaving her and that he was still on the scene. In the 1980 diary the older man referred to him as a “rat”, and a “mongrel” who was “still skulking around”.
Proceeding
