Budge and Ibrahim’s brutal love laid bare
Sarah Budge’s happy memories of shooting guns on holidays with her boyfriend, Kings Cross identity John Ibrahim, seemed a distant memory as she sat in the witness box this week. Read all the details of their unconventional relationship here.
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Model Sarah Budge fired handguns with boyfriend John Ibrahim at a range in Las Vegas on holidays but had no idea he would later plant one in her bedroom behind her back, her trial has heard.
“John normally pays for things and activities when we go on holidays,” Budge told Downing Centre District Court, where she has pleaded not guilty to weapon charges.
“I did a handgun and I did the bigger guns too. The rifle-kind of ones, I don’t know specifically what they were called.”
The couple also legally took aim together in Thailand during a tourist target practice session in early 2014.
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But Budge testified that she has no interest in firearms and would never keep something so dangerous in her home, which is why she was shocked when police found a stolen, loaded Glock pistol in her Double Bay unit.
She blames her 51-year-old partner or someone close to him for stashing it there without her knowledge in August 2017.
Her trial has exposed her fractured relationship with Mr Ibrahim, the former Kings Cross identity, which contrasts with the picture-perfect couple portrayed on social media.
In evidence Budge told of the callousness Mr Ibrahim showed the 29-year-old as she fretted over her dying mother, and revealed their fights about past lovers.
Her lawyers claim DNA found on the trigger of the gun likely belonged to Mr Ibrahim.
The former nightclub owner, who Budge has been dating for six years, hasn’t once supported her in court.
A jury is deliberating Budge’s fate but the two-week trial revealed just how turbulent the pair’s relationship had become by the time she was arrested on August 8, 2017.
Budge met Mr Ibrahim when he walked into Crane Bar — the Potts Point restaurant Budge owns — for dinner with friends, the court heard.
She did not yet know that the man 21 years her senior owned the entire building. Later, as her landlord, Mr Ibrahim agreed to renegotiate Budge’s rent while also negotiating a first date.
As their bond grew, Budge hoped to marry him, sending him photographs of herself in a wedding dress from a fashion shoot as well as pictures of rings as a “playful hint”.
“LOL I love you John, even though you are busy, mentally not here. You will come back,” Budge wrote in one text in May 2017. “I got all these lady vitamins on my way home. I can’t wait to have a family with you, it’s killing me!”
But the charismatic man who called himself “Sexy John” at times treated Budge with “absolute contempt”, and two weeks before the August raids he enraged his partner by declaring he was single on live radio while promoting his book Last King of the Cross, the court heard.
Mr Ibrahim was often cold when Budge needed him most — her mum was losing a battle with breast cancer, the jury was told. Shutting her down with curt texts, Mr Ibrahim brought Budge to tears and ignored her for days on end.
Budge wanted Mr Ibrahim to one day father her children, but when she entrusted him to take care of her cavoodle Zoe the dog fell off a balcony at his clifftop Dover Heights mansion and broke its pelvis in two places, she said.
At that time Mr Ibrahim had never slept over at Budge’s unit and had only visited twice, when he had commented that she “got the small, shitty room.”
“He’s quite set in his ways and he likes his space and his privacy,” she said.
After spending the night in a cell following the raids, Budge said she confronted Mr Ibrahim who told her it was “best I didn’t know” why the gun was in her home, adding she was in “enough trouble as it is”.
Budge cried while defending her choice to stand by him despite the significant breach of trust. “I don’t think he deliberately put me in this bad position,” she said. “I don’t think he’d try and do something to hurt me.”
The jury has now retired to consider its verdict.