Following guilty pleas on a limited factual basis to sexual assault, sexual interference, and sexual exploitation, the court conducted a Gardiner hearing to determine whether the accused's sexual abuse extended over the broader five-year period charged.
The court accepted the complainant's account of progressive grooming and repeated sexual abuse beginning when she was a child, and found that the secretly recorded final assault strongly corroborated her evidence and undermined the accused's claim that the abuse began only months earlier.
The accused's evidence was rejected as implausible and internally inconsistent, and the mother's evidence was given no confidence on the question of opportunity.
The court found the accused guilty of the offences as charged over the full period.
