A victim has confronted the coach who deceived and abused her as a child for several years, describing the perpetrator as "selfish, conniving and evil".
"He deserves to be punished for his actions because I will never be able to re-write my past or continue my future without forgetting," the victim said from a remote witness room on Thursday.
Her abuser, who cannot be named for legal reasons, sat silently in the ACT Magistrates Court as he was directly addressed in the victim impact statement.
"[The offender] singlehandedly reached through time and changed the course of my life forever," the victim told the court.
"There's not a day that goes by where I don't think of him and his manipulative, deceptive and obsessive nature towards myself."
The 71-year-old predator previously admitted to four counts of committing an act of indecency on a child under special care, and one count each of committing an act of indecency on a child and the intimate capturing of visual data.
Some of the charges are rolled up to reflect several crimes.
The court heard how the offender crushed the victim's aspirations of playing sport for Australia, a dream he was hired to help her achieve.
Instead, she said, his "twisted and amoral actions" crushed her passion for sport, something which connected her with family.
"He stole this huge part of my identity from me like it was nothing. Like it was never a little kid's dream," she said.
The offender used this dream to remain close with his victim, on one occasion threatening to quit being her coach and move overseas if "there was nothing between them".
Despite the man's guilty pleas, prosecutor David Swan submitted to the court there was no evidence of his remorse.
The 71-year-old repeatedly told an assessing psychologist "he does not feel guilty for his behaviour" and "he believed at the time ... he was behaving in a manner that reflected the victim's best interests".
"The evidence indicates [the offender] does not have good insight into his personal failings and attributes, and that he may have a distorted sense of himself and his actions," the psychologist said.
Defence lawyer Tim Sharman said his client had accepted responsibility for his actions and had been reported as being truthful with the psychologist.
He also asked the court to factor in the man's compliance with the "very, very restrictive" bail conditions since August 2022, which including being "practically on house arrest".
Agreed facts previously tendered to the court detail the man's prolonged crimes and how he meticulously abused his position and trust gained to be alone with the victim, often without her parents' knowledge.
"The offending involves repeated and perverse breaches of trust," Mr Swan said in written submissions.
The crimes began in recent years when the girl was aged under 16 and her parents hired the man to be a specialist athletics coach.
After an initially agreed upon 12-week block of training, the offender was hired, at his request, to be the girl's "personal coach".
What followed was a prolonged deception, as the man found ways to spend multiple hours with the child on a daily basis.
He tricked her into sexualised conversations and regularly touched her under the guise of purported physio "sessions" and different forms of training, telling the victim she was a "kinaesthetic learner".
On one occasion, he took and kept images of the victim in a swimming top.
The offending escalated to asking the victim to fill out a "sexual arousal questionnaire", repeatedly suggesting they have sex, sharing details of his sexual history and recording sexual conversations in a journal.
He continued trying to reach the young victim despite her parents eventually ending his coaching position and telling him to cease contact.
When police arrested the offender last year, they found his extensive journal and evidence of a commissioned artwork of himself and the victim.
The man's iPad password was the victim's name and birthday.
Mr Swan is set to argue why the court should lift the suppression order on the man's name when the case returns in April.
- Support is available for those who may be distressed. Phone Lifeline 13 11 14; Bravehearts 1800 272 831; Blue Knot Foundation 1300 657 380.
