Jose Mora-Afonso: Hairdresser jailed for child abuse image stash
A former eastern suburbs salon owner wept in the dock as he was handed his sentence for possessing a staggering 1,020,490 images and almost 10,000 videos of sickening child abuse, some of which involved babies. Warning: Graphic Content.
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A former eastern suburbs hairdresser shook his head and then wept as a judge found the more than one million child abuse images on his personal devices were used for his sexual pleasure.
Jose Mora-Afonso, 40, pleaded guilty to the offence but maintained that he had simply been handed a hard drive containing the child abuse material by one of his male escort clients, and was not attracted to children.
Mora-Afonso, who owned hairdressing salon SouthWestNine in Rushcutters Bay until at least early to mid-2018, claimed that following a relationship breakdown he fell into ice abuse and sex work for extra cash, stumbling on the files which he thought were tax documents.
In the Downing Centre District Court on Friday, he was sentenced to three years in prison, with a non-parole period of one year and nine months for a charge of possessing child abuse images, and nine months for disseminating two of the images online.
Mora-Afonso will be eligible for release in May 2021, having already spent 447 days in custody.
The court heard the 1,020,490 photos and almost 10,000 videos were strewn across eight of his devices, including his mobile phone, his laptop and his iPad, which were discovered when police searched his Darlinghurst home and arrested him in early 2019.
Even if he was handed the material, Judge Zahra concluded, he would have had to download it onto his various devices.
Many of the images, the court heard, included young children under the age of six, infants and babies being sexually abused, as well as infants being tied down while being sexually assaulted.
Police also found a Skype chat on one of the implicated hard drives, which showed Mora-Afonso and another person discussing fantasies about children they would want to sexually assault.
He used his own name in the online conversation and sent the user two images he describes as “the 14-year-old” wearing a red shirt and no pants holding his erect penis in his hand, the court heard.
“In my view, the conversations referred to can be used to inform the court of the offender’s sexual interest in children,” Judge Zahra said.
“He used the child abuse material for sexual gratification”.
Judge Zahra said the offending was made more serious because of the nature of abuse carried out in the material, which he described as “violent, cruel and depraved”, as well as the “visible distress depicted by victims in the material.”
In one video, Judge Zahra told the court, a young girl is heard crying as abuse is inflicted on her.
Agreed facts state he was initially apprehended over cocaine and methylamphetamine possession before police seized his phone and found sexually-explicit material in his photo gallery, including one image of an eight to twelve year-old boy unclothed, on a bed, in a sexually-suggestive pose.
Mr Mora-Afonso pleaded guilty to possessing child abuse material and disseminating child abuse material at the earliest opportunity.
He was also convicted of two counts of possessing a prohibited drug including cocaine and GHB, with no other penalty.