John Ibrahim wouldn’t deliberately hurt me: Sarah Budge tells gun trial
John Ibrahim’s girlfriend has broken down in tears in a Sydney court while insisting the Kings Cross identity wouldn’t have intentionally stashed a gun at her home to frame her.
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John Ibrahim’s girlfriend has broken down in tears while insisting the Kings Cross identity wouldn’t have intentionally planted a gun in her Sydney home to frame her.
Model Sarah Budge denied keeping a loaded Glock pistol in her bedroom amid safety concerns in the lead up to the release of Mr Ibrahim’s book, which names convicted killers and alleged questionable characters from the city’s criminal underworld.
The restaurant owner is fighting three firearm possession charges and blames her 51-year-old lover or someone close to him for stashing the stolen weapon in the wardrobe of her Double Bay apartment without her knowledge.
The 29-year-old cried as she explained to a Downing Centre District Court jury why she’s stayed in a relationship with Mr Ibrahim in the two years since police raided her house and arrested her.
“Because I don’t think he deliberately put me in this bad position,” an emotional Budge said on Tuesday.
“I don’t think he’d try and do something to hurt me.”
Budge said Mr Ibrahim told her it was “best I didn’t know” why the gun was in her unit when she confronted him at his clifftop Dover Heights mansion on August 9, 2017, adding she was in “enough trouble as it is.”
“I was a wreck,” Budge said.
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“I’d just spent the night in jail and I wanted to find out why. It turned into an argument … we’ve had it quite a few times over the past couple of years.”
Prosecutor Chris Taylor labelled it a “ridiculous proposition” that Budge has stood by the former nightclub owner despite such a “significant breach of trust.”
“If you think so … it was hard to deal with that he wouldn’t tell me, absolutely,” she said.
The court heard at the time Budge hoped to marry Mr Ibrahim, and sent him photographs of herself in a wedding dress from a bridal fashion shoot as well as pictures of rings as a “playful hint.”
Budge denied that two weeks before the dawn raids Mr Ibrahim feared retribution from figures identified in his best-selling autobiography, with Mr Taylor suggesting it drove her to keep a gun at her house for protection.
“I don’t think there was a heightened sense of security … I don’t think he was worried people were going to do something,” she said.
Four days before police swooped, Budge and Mr Ibrahim joked that her dog Zoe could be her bodyguard, but she denied this masked real concerns held by her partner who has survived attacks against his own life in the past.
“I don’t think my cavoodle would be a very good bodyguard, no,” Budge said.
“I didn’t feel unsafe, it was purely a joke.”
The court heard colourful Sydney figure Tom Domican sued Mr Ibrahim over his memoir Last King of the Cross, which he said falsely painted him as a heroin-dealing hitman who took part in gang wars.
The trial before Judge David Arnott continues.
Originally published as John Ibrahim wouldn’t deliberately hurt me: Sarah Budge tells gun trial
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