Toowoomba man’s sexual abuse conviction overturned on appeal, court finds story inconsistent

A court has overturned a guilty verdict for a Toowoomba man accused of molesting a girl, with the 11-year-old saying her own mother orchestrated some of the vile claims.

A Toowoomba man accused of molesting an 11-year-old girl had his conviction overturned after a panel of judges found the child provided false statements to the police, including through a letter concocted by her estranged mother.

The man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was charged with two counts of indecent treatment of a child under 12.

A jury found him guilty of one count at a trial on May 12, 2022 and acquitted him of the second.

The abuse was alleged to have occurred shortly after the girl’s 11th birthday in 2017, at her grandmother’s one-bedroom flat.

It was alleged the girl was feeling ill and went to lie down on her grandmother’s bed, but was followed by the man, a family friend, who rubbed her belly for 15 minutes before touching her genitalia.

The court heard the girl had a troubled upbringing and was removed from her mother’s care, living at times with her grandmother or in a foster home.

The man appealed the jury’s verdict on two grounds.

He claimed discrepancies and inaccuracies in the girl’s account of the offending, and that she made false reports about the man assaulting her and her cousin, and false reports she was abused by her neighbour and her mother’s ex-boyfriend.

Police investigating the allegations obtained a handwritten letter from the girl where she claimed the man “put his private part inside me, then Gramsie called me and I went to her”.

It also described the girl being assaulted by the man at her uncle’s house.

Neither allegation was raised during her initial police interviews.

Under cross-examination the girl said she did not remember those events.

“I don’t remember what I wrote in the letter because my mum told me what to write in that letter,” she said.

She repeated the allegations two more times before saying they were untrue.

“My mum wanted me to write all this stuff down on the piece of paper,” the girl said.

The girl initially told police that her mother said her ex-boyfriend abused her when she was a toddler, but the mother denied this under cross-examination.

During a formal interview with police on July 18, 2016, the girl said the same man exposed himself to her during a Facetime call.

Under cross-examination the girl said she didn’t remember that and never Facetimed with the man.

The young girls also told police in 2018 that she and her mother saw the ex-boyfriend showering with two children who were scrubbing his back.

The mother denied this under cross-examination.

In overturning the conviction, Justice David Boddice said “a reasonable doubt must have existed” given the differences between the girl’s statements

“Those inconsistencies were not explicable by the effluxion of time or the effect of trauma,” he said.

“They include allegations of multiple acts of penetration, which the complainant readily accepted did not in fact take place.”