Revenge porn threat lands Vahid Khodabandeh in court
A Sydney man has been sentenced in court after he threatened to send a naked image of a Japanese student to her mum and Facebook friends if she didn’t see him again.
The Express
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A 37-year-old man trying to pressure a foreign student into seeing him threatened to send a naked image of her to her mum and Facebook friends, a court has heard.
Vahid Khodabandeh pleaded guilty to threatening to distribute an intimate image without consent today at Burwood Local Court.
Khodabandeh, a 37-year-old man from Lakemba, threatened to send a naked screenshot of a 20-year-old woman to her mum and Facebook friends if she did not fly from Melbourne to Sydney for a visit, according to an agreed statement of facts.
“The facts show such a betrayal of trust that you had with this woman,” Magistrate Margaret McGlynn said.
“The video may have been taken consensually, but it certainly wasn’t taken so you can use it as a weapon to threaten her.”
Khodabandeh invited the student from Japan to his apartment for dinner on April 27. The woman, visiting Sydney from Melbourne, watched television in his bedroom while he cooked her dinner, according to the agreed statement of facts.
She spent the night at his apartment after falling sick from drinking vodka, the facts state, and they both woke up naked the next day.
Khodabandeh invited the woman to join him on the floor in the morning. He pulled out his mobile phone and began recording both of them with the selfie camera, according to the agreed statement of facts.
The next day he began pressuring the woman to see him again, after she had already returned to Melbourne.
“I will tell you when I am free and you come (from Melbourne to Sydney),” he wrote in a text message to the woman, according to the statement of facts.
“U promised … so … don’t make me angry”
When she said she couldn’t afford a plane ticket, he replied a couple of hours later with a screenshot from the video.
“It depicted her naked with her breast exposed, leaning up against the offender’s chest, looking pleased,” according to the statement of facts. “The victim’s face was clearly depicted. The offender’s face was not depicted, only a part of his chest.”
Khodabandeh followed the screen shot with the text, ”Do you want me to send this to your Facebook friends and your mother?”
The woman texted back asking, “Why do you threaten me,” before following it with another message, pleading, “Please. Forgive me, please”.
At school on April 30, she approached the principal “in a distressed state” and told them what happened. The matter was reported to police on May 1.
Before police charged Khodabandeh on May 2, he sent the woman another text message.
“I like to be your boyfriend but of course u don’t have to if u don’t want (roll eye emoji),” it said.
Khodabandeh’s defence lawyer asked the court for no conviction to be placed on his permanent record.
“He is truly sorry,” the defence said.
“I appreciate how hurtful this was, but bearing in mind … he’s already suffered 25 days in custody and been on strict conditional bail for nine months.”
Magistrate McGlynn said the maximum penalty for this offence is three years, but that it was “below the half way mark for seriousness”.
“From your very first conversation with her, you tell her, ‘I want you to be here at a certain time and you be here’,” she said.
“You were setting a boundary in the relationship where you were going to be in control.
“Her following texts, where she begs you to forgive her, show the level of fear she had.”
She said the offence was not trivial and merited a conviction.
Khodabandeh was handed down a correctional release order of 12 months.
Four other charges - including two counts of sexual intercourse without consent, sexually touch another person without consent and incite another to sexually touch them without consent - were withdrawn.
Editor's Note: Mr Khodabandeh appealed to the District Court. On 30 June 2020, the court found Mr Khodabandeh guilty of the offence of threatening to distribute an intimate image without consent without recording a conviction and put him on a 12 month conditional release order.