The man and his victim met on Tinder in 2019. Photo / 123rf
This article deals with the subject of rape and may be distressing.
An “obsessive and manipulative” man installed a spying app on his partner’s phone, allowing him to remotely access her call logs, texts and videos, which he then used to blackmail her for sex.
The man and woman met on dating app Tinder in 2019 and were in a relationship for most of the following year.
The woman only learned about the spyware on her phone two weeks after she tried to end the relationship in October 2020. That was when the sextortion began.
Her abuser cannot be named because doing so would identify the woman, whose details have been suppressed in court proceedings.
But the man was found guilty after a trial on two charges of rape and two of unlawful sexual connection. A District Court jury acquitted him of another rape charge.
He admitted two charges of blackmail and one of accessing a computer for dishonest purposes.
The man was sentenced in the District Court to 13 years in prison and has unsuccessfully appealed that sentence to the High Court in Hamilton.
Chief High Court judge Justice Susan Thomas’ decision dismissing the appeal said that the man and woman had a volatile relationship, complicated by the man’s jealousy about the woman’s former partner, fears of rejection by her family and suspicions of infidelity.
In August 2020, he used her phone to order pizza, taking the chance to download the spy app on to it.
This gave him access through a portal on his own phone to the woman’s call history, texts, messages, sound recordings and videos. He was trying to catch the woman being unfaithful.
She did not learn about this until he arranged to meet her in his car two weeks after she broke up with him.
He then told her about the spyware on her phone and that he had been accessing her text messages.
The man showed her a naked photograph of herself captioned with her name and place of work, threatening to publish it in the local area if she did not tell him what he wanted to hear.
He then locked the doors to the car, told her to do as she was told and raped her.
Justice Thomas’s judgment also describes further abuse, in which the man later forced the woman into agreements to do as he said and meet him for sex, saying he would delete images of her from his phone if she did.
The woman also became upset when she viewed a video of her daughter on the man’s phone.
One of the agreements allowed the man to “do whatever he wanted if he would then leave her alone, delete all naked images of her that he had, destroy the physical copies of the photographs and take her home afterwards”, Justice Thomas said.
The man then raped and violated the woman again, putting his hand over her mouth to muffle her.
Afterwards, he told her he would not keep to the agreement.
In the District Court, Judge Stephen Clark described the relationship between the man and the woman as tumultuous.
“The judge had no doubt that, from the tone of the messages and language used, [the man] attempted to control the relationship and was manipulative and obsessive throughout,” Justice Thomas said.
The man appealed against his prison sentence. One of the appeal grounds was that the judge’s starting point in calculating the sentence was out of proportion to the offending.
Justice Thomas said the man’s offending involved two separate incidents, both involving blackmail, rape and sexual violation, and ongoing conduct over a period of approximately three weeks.
She saw no error in the sentencing judge’s approach and found the end result of 13 years of imprisonment for all the offending was not manifestly excessive.
The judgment noted that the man had been previously convicted, in 2002, of indecent assault, stupefying another victim, and aggravating wounding by stupefying.
Ric Stevens spent many years working for the former New Zealand Press Association news agency, including as a political reporter at Parliament, before holding senior positions at various daily newspapers. He joined NZME’s Open Justice team in 2022 and is based in Hawke’s Bay. His writing in the crime and justice sphere is informed by four years of front-line experience as a probation officer.
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