Goran ‘Dom’ Bijeljic: Pizza shop creep avoids jail over ‘drug-fuelled joke’

A restaurateur who exposed himself to multiple women inside his Sunshine pizza shop has avoided jail over what he described as a “drug-fuelled joke”. Find out why.

The former owner of a pizza restaurant who exposed himself in front of six women has avoided jail over the “sexual joke”.

Goran “Dom” Bijeljic, of Kealba, was arrested by police on August 6, 2018, after four women came forward describing similar experiences between June 2017 and July 2018.

Each woman told police how they were walking along Durham Rd or Watts St in Sunshine when they passed Bijeljic’s restaurant Dom’s Pizza and Pasta.

Inside, the women saw the 53-year-old “furiously” masturbating while leering at them.

When Bijeljic was interviewed, he provided a “no comment” response.

Far from curbing the behaviour after his arrest, another woman came forward the following month with the same story.

The 36-year-old said she passed the restaurant at about 6.30am on October 10, seeing the restaurateur masturbating inside the store about a metre from the entrance.

She told police it “felt like he was looking for an audience”.

The following year on January 10 one of the women who had previously filed a complaint about his behaviour said she had seen him masturbating again when she walked past.

Bijeljic faced the Sunshine Magistrates’ Court on Wednesday after pleading guilty to the offending.

The court heard he had owned the store for 27 years and, at the time, was often working seven days a week and sleeping in the rear of the store.

Two of his victims wrote impact statements detailing the effect his offending has had on their lives.

The court heard his victims’ were “shocked and disgusted” by his actions, with at least one of the women previously being a loyal customer of the store.

His lawyer said the offending occurred in the context of a decade-long drug addiction and he had managed to remain clean since August 2021 after his arrest for slinging methamphetamine out of the same restaurant.

“He’s done well with the community corrections order, he’s reconciled with his wife and children and is now back living with the family,” she said.

Bijeljic, who at the time was separated and often living in the store, has since sold the restaurant and is now living at the family home in Kealba.

She said the offending was “drug-fuelled behaviour”, but said Bijeljic thought of it as a “joke”.

“Mr Bijeljic concedes that rather than being a predatory menace, what he was doing was a sexual joke,” she told the court.

He was convicted and sentenced to a 12 month corrections order and will have to completed 90 hours of community work.