Principal sexual abuse trial: Joe Moncarz testifies student accuser, school volunteer both lied

Joe Moncarz, the former principal at Deep Green Bush School in Auckland, has been charged with sexual abuse of a child. Photo / Supplied

It was just days after Auckland’s unorthodox Deep Green Bush School had been thrown into crisis following a bombshell outcry from a young student - that principal Joseph Jacob Moncarz had been sexually abusing her - when Moncarz agreed to meet a parent volunteer who he considered a friend and ally.

Despite the woman’s past support he was suspicious of her motivation, the defendant told jurors today as he sat in the witness box at Manukau District Court, explaining that he had hidden a digital recorder in his pocket and planned to secretly record the meeting.

“I thought I turned it on,” Moncarz said today, adding that he didn’t have time to check the recorder closely as the friend approached him at Duder Regional Park - a short drive from the now-defunct rural Clevedon nature school.

But it turns out there was no recording made, he acknowledged, leaving jurors with the responsibility of deciding between two radically different descriptions of the meeting: one in which Moncarz blatantly admitted guilt and another in which he just as adamantly denied it.

Jurors are expected to begin deliberating on Wednesday in the trial, which started last week. Moncarz, 51, faces eight charges regarding alleged sexual abuse of the same student. He again denied each charge today as he was questioned by his lawyer, David Reece.

Moncarz lost name suppression last week, although other aspects of the case still cannot be reported for legal reasons.

During her testimony last week, the parent volunteer recalled calmly asking Moncarz a series of questions during the walk, steadily garnering from him more explicit details of what happened between him and the child.

“I told him that he could trust me and I wouldn’t tell anyone,” she testified, explaining that he admitted to touching the girl and to being aroused by the act.

But Moncarz said today the woman had thoroughly misunderstood him.

“She kept badgering me and refusing to accept all my denials. I said, ‘Look, nothing happened.’

“... I thought she was out of her mind at that point. I thought maybe she was wearing a police wire at that point. Who asks those kinds of questions?”

He acknowledged that the woman asked if he had touched the girl skin-on-skin and he answered in the affirmative. He thought she might have been referring to an innocuous touch like holding the child’s hand, he said. He also said that he had touched the girl near her upper thigh on two occasions, but he characterised it as an accident after the girl grabbed his hand while playing.

“I pulled my hand right away,” he said.

Moncarz denied telling the woman he was aroused by the touching. He also denied her testimony that he made a joke about going to jail, asking the woman to bring him chocolate and cigarettes that he could trade.

Despite the wide discrepancies, Moncarz still characterised the school volunteer as an honest person.

“You see a girl crying and you hear these allegations, you’re going to respond in an emotional way,” he said. “We all have this tendency - we want to believe right away. I understand it because we’re all human.”

But Moncarz’s version of events is too different for it to have been a simple misunderstanding, Crown prosecutor Luke Radich suggested during cross-examination.

“Either you’re telling the truth or she’s telling the truth,” Radich said, adding that if Moncarz’s version is correct it means the woman who had respected and admired him decided to lie to police and commit perjury.

Moncarz disagreed.

“It’s clear she didn’t understand what I was saying at Duder and she was in the wrong frame of mind,” he said.

“What’s the lesson of Sherlock Holmes? Never make your decisions based on emotions, and gather all of your facts first. I didn’t get that.”

When pressed by the Crown, Moncarz acknowledged that his stance is that the witness lied with some parts of her testimony.

“She was trying to trick me and ... using techniques you’d expect from a cop doing an interrogation,” he said. “The second we met I knew something was wrong.”

Radich suggested it wasn’t the witness who had been in the wrong state of mind that day but the defendant.

“I’m always steady. I’m always steady,” Moncarz responded. “I do not react to things emotionally.”

Moncarz was the last witness to testify in the trial.

Both sides are expected to give their closing addresses tomorrow, followed by a summing up by Judge Nick Webby on Wednesday.