By CAMERON LUCADOU-WELLS
A TOORADIN woodworker and grandfather has been convicted and fined $2000 for using a hidden camera to record a woman using his workshop toilet.
Ian Robertson, who pleaded guilty in Dandenong Magistrates’ Court, had recorded the complainant naked from the waist down on at least 10 separate occasions in August last year.
Around that time, he had collected 332 individual surveillance recordings from the toilet camera over a 13-day period.
Robertson, 63, had told police he had been concerned the complainant was using her mobile phone in the toilet.
The court was told police found no evidence of the complainant using her phone on the recordings copied onto Robertson’s desktop computer.
Magistrate Jack Vandersteen said: “If he was checking for that benign reason, why did he keep the recordings? Why didn’t he just delete them?”
Police prosecutor Andrew Chiodo told the court last week that Robertson viewed the videos three times a week over an eight-week period.
“It just became a habit,” Robertson allegedly told police.
In tendering a victim impact statement, Senior Constable Chiodo said the complainant suffered a “severe loss of dignity and a sense of betrayal by the accused”. Her father had been friends with Robertson for some time.
Defence lawyer David Dribbin said Robertson “vehemently denied” he had a sexual motive.
He said his “deeply ashamed” client had been married for 32 years and ran a 40-plus-year-old woodturning business.
“[This shows] age is no barrier to stupid and vile behaviour,” Mr Dribbin said.
“He has to live with this for the rest of his life.”
Robertson told the court he was “so mortified with himself”.
Mr Vandersteen told Robertson, who had no prior convictions, it was “sad to see someone your age with this type of offending”.
“Going to the toilet is a private thing and not entitled to be recorded by someone else. It doesn’t matter what the excuse.
“Would you have done this to your grandchildren or your children? You wouldn’t have because you would have intuitively known it’s not right.”
He noted the complainant’s humiliation.
Since the offence, she had no longer had a job and been forced to sell several possessions.
The magistrate ordered the wiping of Robertson’s video camera and computer hard drive.
