Janelle Fletcher is contesting the allegation that she sexually abused a teen girl. Photo / NewsWire
The final arguments in the trial of a music teacher accused of sexually abusing a teen girl have circled around a movie night kiss captured in a photo booth and a series of emotionally charged emails.
Janelle Colville Fletcher, 40, is contesting allegations that she groomed and sexually abused the underage girl some years ago and appeared again on Monday at the South Australian District Court before Judge Joanne Fuller.
The prosecution, led by Chris Allen, allege Fletcher abused the girl in various locations and also that she communicated with her and another teenage girl to make them amenable to sexual activity.
Some of the alleged offending happened when the two girls and Fletcher were alone together in a room, the prosecution said, with the teacher allegedly performing a lap dance on a chair.
She then allegedly “dared” the two girls to kiss each other and asked if they would “date” each other.
That same night, Allen said, Fletcher then spent time alone with one of the girls and touched her genital area.
The alleged grooming and abuse of the girl then went on for months at various locations, the prosecution said, including the home of Fletcher and in Fletcher’s car.
Alongside oral evidence from the alleged victims, the prosecution presented a series of texts, emails and photographs to support its case, including a photo of Fletcher and the girl kissing at a cinema photo booth.
In his closing address, Allen said the “objective evidence” of the photo booth kiss showed an “unlawful sexual act”.
He argued further that the “sheer volume” of photos of Fletcher and the girl together suggested a sexual relationship.
“They look like girlfriends [in the photographs] … in a relationship between girlfriends,” Allen said.
In her testimony from last week, Fletcher said the photo booth kiss was a “pretend kiss” she did not want or mean to happen.
“It was meant to be a pretend kiss like we had done previously where our lips don’t actually touch, and in that particular photo we got close and she did sort of pull me in and the photo went off, yeah,” Fletcher said.
There is dispute between the defence and prosecution about the correct sequence order of photos from the booth.
The prosecution says the correct sequence runs from top to bottom in the order of one, two, three and then four.
In “photo 4”, Fletcher appears happy and the prosecution argues this shows she was happy to kiss the girl and not shocked or upset by it.
Fletcher and her defence team, led by Andrew Culshaw, claim that photo was taken before the kiss and should not be seen as approval of the act, with the correct sequence of photos running one, two, four and then three.
Culshaw also argued the photo did not show child sexual abuse because the girl had turned 17 at the time of the photo, and so she was therefore not a child when the kiss happened.
Further, Fletcher was also no longer in a position of authority at the time of the kiss, the defence said.
“What Your Honour has, in my submission, is evidence of a kiss at a time when it was legal,” Culshaw said.
The prosecution argued that a series of emotionally expressive emails from Fletcher to the girl revealed the “true nature” of the relationship between them.
In one email, Fletcher told the girl “I want something serious not something short term”.
In others, she said “my feelings for you are not lust but love” and “right now, we can’t be open. Right now we will have to continue as we are in secret …”
Fletcher had earlier argued the emails showed non-sexual “love” for the girl, but Allen dismissed that argument on Monday as “absurd”.
“This is not ‘I love you’ in some sort of Catholic way,” Allen said.
Culshaw, in his closing address, acknowledged under questioning from Judge Fuller that the emails appeared “terrible” on a first or literal reading in that they seemed to suggest the pair had been in a sexual relationship.
But he argued a deeper reading of the emails fit with Fletcher’s testimony.
She claimed last week that they were written to keep the girl happy and guide her away to a more age-appropriate relationship.
“These emails are consistent with a relatively young teacher, in her early 30s, who had got herself in too deep … and so was trying to deal with the situation and extricate herself from it,’ Culshaw said.
Culshaw said the only part of the emails that might be read as “overtly” sexual was the line on “lust”, but he argued her denial of lust reaffirmed her evidence.
“Denial can’t be then tortured into an admission,” he said.
Further, he stressed Fletcher was not being “charged” with the content of the emails.
In his afternoon address, Culshaw invited Judge Fuller to look with scepticism on the credibility of the oral evidence presented at trial, drilling into what he called “catastrophic inconsistencies” in the claims against Fletcher.
In one instance, he cast doubt on witness testimony to the “truth or dare” game.
The two girls spoke together about the alleged event after it had happened, he claimed, and there was a risk their evidence had been “contaminated”.
“There is a risk here that these two witnesses have contaminated one another ... and the recollection, to the extent that it was consistent between the two of them, there is a risk that what Your Honour is getting is a single collective version of history rather than two separate and independent versions of history.
“They have both given evidence that there was a game of truth or dare, but neither of them could really say what the truths were, what the dares were, beyond the big headline matters.”
Fletcher holds a PhD in music education.
She told the court that she was heterosexual and believed in the Catholic faith.
She was still legally married to a man, though the pair had separated, she told the court.
Judge Fuller will deliver her verdict on August 20.