Shegu Bobb, 27, leaves the ACT Courts during his jury trial. Photo: Albert McKnight.
CONTENT WARNING: This article refers to alleged child sexual abuse.
A man on trial for allegedly sexually assaulting an 11-year-old girl has repeatedly claimed he thought she was 19 at the time, after she listed that as her age on a dating app.
Shegu Bobb was 21 when he allegedly exchanged indecent messages and photos with an 11-year-old girl over the dating app Badoo, before indecently assaulting and digitally raping her in his car in February 2020.
The now 27-year-old pleaded not guilty to nine charges when his ACT Supreme Court jury trial began last week, before jurors heard the recordings of the girl’s evidence.
Mr Bobb testified himself on Monday (23 June), in which he repeatedly claimed he thought the girl was at least 19 when they were messaging over the app.
While the girl set her age as 19 on Badoo, she weighed about 30 kg and was around 140 cm tall at the time.
During cross-examination, Mr Bobb said when he met her, he thought she was “a petite 19-year-old”.
After she got into his car, she didn’t say anything verbally to him and kept messaging him over the app.
“I thought it was a bit unusual and weird. But I thought she was just nervous,” Mr Bobb said.
Prosecutor Marcus Dyason asked what he had been thinking when the girl was sending him messages like, “I’m just so scared”, in the car.
“That she had cold feet,” he replied.
During closing submissions on Tuesday (24 June), Mr Dyason said there were two questions for jurors to decide: what Mr Bobb understood the girl’s age to be at the time of the allegations and what happened between them inside the car.
He said Mr Bobb accepted the only reason he thought the girl was over 18 was because she had been using a dating app for adults.
Shegu Bobb has pleaded not guilty to all of his charges. Photo: Albert McKnight.
Mr Bobb had allegedly sent the girl a message saying, “Yeah, that’s a fairly huge gap between us, hope you don’t tell anyone”.
The prosecutor said when he asked Mr Bobb why he sent this message, the latter replied that at that stage he thought he had been “a mature adult” and to him there was “a fairly huge age gap” between a 19-year-old and a 21-year-old.
He also said he was talking about life experience when referring to a huge gap.
But logically, Mr Dyason said, there was not a huge gap between a 19-year-old and a 21-year-old.
The prosecutor claimed Mr Bobb’s answers to his questions had been illogical or didn’t make sense and argued he had known the girl was under 16 when sending her messages.
“The messages reveal as much,” he alleged.
When it came to discussing the girl’s evidence, Mr Dyason said while she clearly hadn’t been honest with police in her first interview with them, he urged jurors to approach her evidence through “the lens of an 11-year-old facing an extremely difficult situation”.
But defence barrister James Sabharwal said the girl had falsely claimed she had been sexually assaulted by a different person earlier in February 2020.
“An accusation of a sexual nature is quite easy to make,” he told jurors.
Mr Sabharwal said the girl signed up to Badoo, listing her age as 19, and it was her, not his client, who introduced the plan to have sex shortly into their conversation on the app.
“You might think that often people who are on a dating app don’t ask supplementary questions of ‘what’s your age’,” he said.
The barrister said the girl made “significant lies”, as in her first interview with police she claimed a man had threatened her to get into his car before he choked her.
She then lied in her second interview with police, he said, and when she was challenged about her lies she became evasive.
Also, when the now teenage girl was cross-examined, Mr Sabharwal said, she said she couldn’t remember if Mr Bobb had digitally raped her in the car.
Mr Bobb has pleaded not guilty to three counts of using a person for child abuse material, two counts of committing an act of indecency on a person under 16, two counts of using a carriage service to procure a person under 16, one count of sexual intercourse with a person under 16 and one count of transmitting indecent communication to a person under 16.
The trial continues before Justice Belinda Baker.
If this story has raised any concerns for you, 1800RESPECT, the national 24-hour sexual assault, family and domestic violence counselling line, can be contacted on 1800 737 732. Help and support are also available through the Canberra Rape Crisis Centre on 02 6247 2525, the Domestic Violence Crisis Service ACT 02 6280 0900, the Sexual Violence Legal Services on 6257 4377 and Lifeline on 13 11 14. In an emergency, call Triple Zero.
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