An Albion Park Rail dance teacher accused of sending explicit Snapchat messages to his 14-year-old pupil has denied wrongdoing, telling investigating police he took so little interest in the girl he couldn’t be sure which age category she took classes in.
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“She’s tall, I guess,” Jay William Patterson told federal police agents in an October 12, 2016 interview, when asked to describe the teen. “Tall, athletic. All the kids are … athletic.”
Patterson, now aged 26, faces a single charge of using a carriage service to transmit indecent communication to a person under 16. He is accused of sending pictures of his penis to the teen, who earlier sent him a picture of herself in pajama bottoms and a bra.
In a recording played to the jury at Wollongong District Court on Wednesday, Patterson described himself as “hopeless with technology” and a late adopter of social media.
He claimed another student of the Sydney dance school, a family friend, had used his phone and added the teen to his Snapchat contacts.
“For a few weeks I didn’t even know who the person was on my phone that I was talking to,” he said. “I always made a conscious effort to never have personal contact with students.”
Asked why he didn’t sever online ties with the girls, he said: “Now when I look back on it I would have been a smarter option but I saw it as just a friendly sort of thing and I tried to keep it professional. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t friggin’ have them on my Snapchat in the first place.”
Patterson detailed his poor mental health and financial troubles, which he attributed to the failure of a dance school he opened in Wollongong years earlier.
He said he suffered from chronic depression and was receiving “10 calls a day” from banks, tax agents and parents owned money from the failed venture.
It was in these circumstances, he claims, that he opted to change his phone number when his mobile phone went missing, some time after the dance studio’s owner called him to raise the allegations and part ways.
Asked to respond to allegations he sent the teen an image of his penis, he declined to comment. He also responded “no comment” to claims the teen sent images of herself in underwear, and that he sent a message asking her to undress.
He initially told the agents he couldn’t recall his Snapchat handle but later agreed, laughing, that it was the name the agents proposed.‘Saucyburger’.
“That’s just sort of an alias,” he said, adding the origins of the name were “a long story” that “goes back to high school”.
The trial, before Judge Andrew Haesler, continues on Thursday.