Colt family incest case: Survivor tells court of life inside ‘cult’
A child of the Colt clan has lifted the lid on the alleged sexual and physical abuse handed down by the elders of Australia's most infamous alleged incest "cult".
Police & Courts
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A daughter of the infamous Colt clan has tearfully told a court of depraved horrors allegedly visited upon the children by nomadic family elders who conspired to keep them trapped on the fringe of civilisation.
The 27-year-old woman, Petra Colt, told Downing Centre District Court that she and her siblings were the children of Tim Colt and his own daughter Betty.
Police accuse her uncle Frank of raping her in the back seat of his car at an isolated rural property in southern NSW.
It was at the same squalid farm where authorities later found almost 40 relatives living together in July 2012.
A dozen of the family’s underage children, many inbred, malnourished and illiterate, were taken into care but Petra was among the young adults left behind.
The court heard Petra’s grandmother was the only one who told her “if you could, just get out of here”.
The year after the raid the young woman told detectives she was in “a cult which involves family together”, the court heard.
“I don’t know what’s right or wrong anymore, but I think it’s wrong what my family are doing,” she told police.
She explained all her adult aunts, uncles and cousins were sleeping together – and younger children had been as well until the raid.
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It was in 2018, after severing ties with her mother, Petra again spoke with police about life inside the secretive clan and alleged Frank had “forced himself” on her in early 2010.
The court heard Petra and her alleged attacker shared the same father.
“I was kicking him, punching him, pulling his hair,’ she told the court on Tuesday.
“He kept going and going he wouldn't stop.”
After the ordeal was over, she told the court, he threw her clothes out the car window and told her to”get”. He called her a “pig” and an “ungrateful b****” she said.
The woman has never been to school, is illiterate and legally blind.
One eye is permanently and visibly damaged – she told the court that was because she had been bashed severely by another tormenting uncle.
As a result some of Petra’s statements were not written but instead presented to the court as conversations recorded at her home.
She broke down in tears in the witness box watching them replayed in court.
Frank Colt has pleaded not guilty to one count of sexual intercourse without consent and his lawyer, cross-examining Petra, accused her of making up the accusation to please the police.
“No, I didn’t,” she said softly.
She later told NSW Police she wasn't "in her right mind" and may have been drug affected when she made the comments, the court heard. Petra now disputes saying that to police.
Petra also recounted trying to escape the cult at age eight but her parents tied her up and left her without food, inside a room, for a whole week along with other sexual abuse by other members of the clan.
The trial continues.