Molester uncle said niece’s sex nightmare was just a ‘dream’

An uncle who molested his two teenage nieces as they slept over at his house has failed to convince a judge that they lied about the abuse, or that it was all a “dream”.

A HOBART man who sexually abused his teenage nieces while they slept has failed to convince a magistrate that one girl dreamt the attack and the other girl lied.

The man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, denied he indecently assaulted his nieces when they were about 16 – one about 1999 and the other in 2003.

But Deputy Chief Magistrate Michael Daly, in a newly-published decision, said he accepted the victims’ versions of events.

One of the victims told the Hobart Magistrates Court she had been living with her aunty and uncle when one morning he entered her room while she slept facedown on a bunk bed.

She said he lay on top of her and she “froze” during the assault before she left the room, showered for half an hour and cried.

The woman said she left for work without her usual cigarette and coffee with her aunty, had a bad day at work, and was reprimanded for being rude to customers.

The other victim said one night she was woken by her uncle massaging her back “intensely” while also seemingly masturbating, but she didn’t say anything and was afraid to move.

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She said the next morning, her uncle asked her not to tell her aunty what happened.

The man later claimed his stepson was behind the allegations after he’d refused helping the boy during a time of crisis and had manipulated his mother into not seeing him.

He argued the allegation from the first girl was implausible, vague, showed signs of “false certainty”, and said her claims were inconsistent with her behaviour of leaving her own daughters alone with him.

But Mr Daly accepted her as a “witness of truth”, noting that if she did leave her children with her uncle, people responded differently to sexual crimes such as “long family attachment and the understandable desire to avoid unpleasantness”.

Mr Daly also rejected the man’s claim, that the second allegation had “the hallmarks of a dream-sequence” occurring immediately between periods of sleep and that she was an unreliable witness.

The man will be sentenced at a later date.