It was December 23, 2012; a day when two teenage boys from the Illawarra should have been doing last-minute Christmas shopping and looking forward to celebrating the festive season with their families.
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Instead, the pair were in separate interview rooms at Lake Illawarra police station, detailing to child protection officers allegations of sexual assault at the hands of their work colleague.
What started out as friendship between the teens and the then 21-year-old, who worked as a shift supervisor at a McDonald’s restaurant south of Wollongong, soon took on a sexual tone.
The man asked the boys, aged 15 and 16 at the time, intimate questions about their bodies and wanted to see photos of them without clothes in exchange for payment, prosecutors claimed in a Sydney courtroom on Wednesday.
Despite rejecting the alleged advances, and feeling awkward about them, the boys continued to socialise with the man, who drove them to and from work and, in the case of one of the teens, developed a friendship with the boy’s mother and regularly went to his house.
But both complainants told police they soon fell victim to the man’s sexual desires, with one alleging the man stroked his penis and performed fellatio on him during a Christmas party in December 2011, while the other claimed the accused crept into his bedroom while staying the night at his house in August 2012 and touched his thigh and tried to pull his underwear down.
The man was charged in 2013 over the alleged assaults.
He pleaded not guilty to one count of sexual intercourse without consent and three counts of assault with an act of indecency, with the man’s lawyer telling District Court jurors on Wednesday his client ‘‘categorically denied’’ the allegations against him.
One of the complainants was the first to give evidence in the trial, telling the court the man was staying the night to watch over him and his brother while their mother was interstate when the August incident allegedly occurred.
‘‘At about 2am someone came into my room and put their hand on my thigh, moving it up towards my penis, I told them to f--- off,’’ the now 18-year-old said.
‘‘They got up to walk out but only shut the door half way and stood there for a bit. With the light from the bathroom, I could see it was [the defendant].’’
The teen said two hours later he woke again to find the man had returned to his room and was trying to pull his underwear down.
He again told the man to leave, saying he identified him from the bathroom light as well as the light on the mobile phone the older man was carrying.
The teen told a friend about the alleged incident later that morning, but did not tell his mother about it until December 2012.
The court heard in the second half of 2012 the man gave the teen a gift for his 16th birthday, consisting of a photo album containing multiple pictures of the boy from early childhood (the pictures were supplied to the man by the boy’s mother), as well as recent photos of him, some in which he was in various states of undress.
‘‘There were photos of me sleeping on the lounge in my underwear and photos of my arse...photos of me getting changed into and out of my wetsuit...photos of me working at McDonald’s,’’ the teen said.
‘‘Did you know the photos had been taken?’’ Crown prosecutor Peter McGrath, SC, asked him.
‘‘No, most of the [underwear shots] were taken when I was asleep,’’ the teen replied.
He said little cards accompanied the photos, each with comments written on them including ‘‘check out that arse’’, ‘‘sexy’’ and ‘‘cute’’.
The trial continues.
