*Reader discretion is advised. A Wangaratta man has been sentenced to nearly 10 years in jail for sexually abusing a girl from the age of 12 in the 1990s. The 63-year-old appeared at Wangaratta County Court last month after a jury found him guilty of five charges of sexual penetration of a child under 16 and four charges of committing an indecent act with the same child and her sister, both under 16. He was given a non-parole period of six years and nine months with his full nine year and nine-month sentence, and he was placed on the sex registers list for life. The court heard the offending against one of the children occurred between December 1996 and January 1997, when she was 12 and 13 years old and he was 33. At the time the man had a partner and they lived together in Wangaratta with their two sons. The two victims lived nearby with their mother and would stay at the man’s house from time to time as cousins of the man’s partner. The court heard on three consecutive nights before Christmas in 1996, while at the Wangaratta man’s home, he entered the then 12-year-old girl’s bedroom where she was sleeping, touched her breasts, kissed her, and sexually penetrated her. According to the girl, she did not say or do anything, she just laid there. The court heard according to the victim, when she stayed over at the man’s home between the ages of 12 and 16, the man went into the girl’s bedroom and “sexually penetrated her every chance he got”. The court heard the girl was scared and confused and it had become so regular it became normal. She said after she turned 16, the man continued to have sex with her into her early 20s. She said she could not remember exactly how it came to an end, but she felt when she had children herself, she had to cut ties with him. The jury also found the man had rubbed the girl’s sister’s breasts on one occasion when she was 15 years old in 1997. According to the victim, this was the second time the man had touched her breasts and when he did so, she told the man she would tell her mother if he did it again. At trial, defence for the accused argued he had a sexual relationship with one of the girls, which commenced when she was an adult, but never as a child. He denied engaging in sexual activity with the girl’s sister. The court heard the victim wrote two letters to the man in September 2022 accusing him of having sex with her from the age of 12 until she was a young adult on a “very regular basis”. She confronted him at his workplace when he failed to respond, and she said the man “sidestepped” the accusation. The matter was reported to police in October 2022, and the man was charged in August 2023. He was committed to trial which commenced on 13 November 2025, with the jury delivering their guilty verdicts on 3 December 2025. The man has been in custody since he was found guilty. Victim impact statements from both girls and their mother were heard in court. The court heard the youngest of the girls began experimenting with drugs and alcohol at around the age of 13 to numb the pain of the man’s abuse and suffered from enduring symptoms of anxiety, depression and PTSD. Judge George Georgiou said the man showed no remorse for his “repugnant criminality” and grossly betrayed the girls’ trust in him as a family figure. “Your offending was objectively, extremely serious,” he said. “There was an inherent violence in your sexual penetration of her… additionally, you touched her breasts in a revolting lead-up to sexually penetrating her.” * Under court order the defendant cannot be named for protection of the identity of the victims.
