When Grant Ronald Price was confronted by police after four years of sexually abusing a young girl he said she should take some of the blame.
The victim, who he had sexually assaulted up to 200 times, had flirted with him, he said.
Before the Dunedin District Court yesterday, defence counsel Anne Stevens QC said the 53-year-old now resiled from that comment and took full responsibility for his behaviour.
It did not save him from jail.
Despite Mrs Stevens’ argument he should be given home detention, Judge Emma Smith sentenced Price to two years, two months’ imprisonment.
The offending, which began when the victim was 12, had deeply traumatised her, the court heard.
She read a tearful victim impact statement detailing her diagnoses of post-traumatic-stress disorder, social-anxiety disorder and an eating disorder.
The woman said she hated the way she looked and felt.
“I have bursts of depression when I don’t want to be here any more ... I think no-one loves me, no-one cares,” she said.
Any joy she felt was always fleeting.
“I can’t remember what it’s like to be happy,” the victim said.
Now she struggled to trust anyone, even those who cared for her deeply, and she was adamant she did not want to have children in case the same thing happened to them.
“It should never have happened to me,” she said.
The woman aired the allegations initially in 2015, when Price acknowledged some wrongdoing but blamed his behaviour on work stress.
At that stage it went no further, until the victim made disclosures to police late last year.
Price, Mrs Stevens stressed, had no previous convictions and a long history of successful employment.
He was a “hard-working man, well thought of in the community”.
The court heard the defendant quit work in retail when charges were laid.
Price had arranged sessions with a psychologist and was willing to do any treatment the court ordered.
He took full responsibility for the sexual offending and Mrs Stevens argued it was not “predatory”.
Judge Smith rejected the submission that there were elements of opportunism in Price’s regular sex acts. The acts happened so often, said a police summary, that the victim often thought, “here we go again” when the man began.
The scale of the offending, the judge said, was “extraordinary”.
At its worst, Price was abusing the girl as much as weekly.
While both parties remained clothed throughout the incidents, that would have provided little consolation to the victim, said Judge Smith.
On one occasion, she noted, he lifted the girl’s pyjamas and commented on her physical development.
Price’s name had been suppressed until yesterday but the victim specifically requested the suppression be lifted.
Because he was sentenced to imprisonment, he was automatically added to the Child Sex Offender.
As Price was led to the cells a woman in the public gallery mouthed the words “I love you” to him.
