Alan Jones allegedly kissed his driver, a young man, inside a walk-in wardrobe in James Packer’s personal suite at the Crown Towers hotel in Melbourne, a court has been told.
Complainant C said he and a friend went for a drink in Jones’s room when they were visiting Melbourne for a sporting event and they knew it was “nice” because it was Packer’s personal suite.
C was emotional when giving evidence on Monday at Jones’s trial at Sydney’s Downing Centre local court. Jones has pleaded not guilty to 20 indecent assault charges and two counts of sexual touching in relation to sex men.
Jones was watching Wimbledon on TV in the early 2010s when a butler offered the younger men drinks, C said. They sat on a couch together and drank beer.
C told the court that Jones offered to take him alone for a tour of the suite, saying: “Come on [C] I’ll take you on a tour.” They left his friend behind in the lounge room, the court was told.
Jones allegedly went into a “pretty big” walk-in wardrobe, and C followed him. C told the court Jones then said “I’ve missed you” and the broadcaster “kissed me”.
The prosecutor Georgina Wright asked: “Did you respond in any way?”
C told the court: “I pushed him back; he was very close to my body. I put two hands up and pushed him back. I said ‘Let’s go back to [my friend]’.”
The court heard Jones stopped what he was doing and the two men went back to the lounge room. He didn’t tell his friend what had happened. Packer was the executive chairman of Crown Resorts and is not accused of wrongdoing.
Complainant C, the second alleged victim to give evidence, said he told friends and family about the abuse once he had stopped working for Jones. Later still, he told the journalists Peter FitzSimons and Kate McClymont at the Sydney Morning Herald.
C said on Monday that “romantic” and “intimate” text messages from Jones continued for years after he left 2GB radio and he felt pressured to invite Jones to his wedding to stay in his favour.
Texts from Jones were along the lines of “I miss you very much, love you darling,” C told the court.
Years later, when he had left 2GB, C told his father-in-law he had been indecently assaulted by Jones when his relative suggested MeToo victims were motivated by money.
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C said the disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein was in the news at the time and his father-in-law made a comment about people making up claims for money and “just to make a name for themselves”.
“I said now is probably a good time to tell you that this is what Alan Jones did to me,” C told the court on Monday. “And it’s responses like that that would stop me from telling what happened. I am now the father of your grandchild, and I wouldn’t want my name out there.”
The father-in-law said “I am so sorry”, complainant C told the court.
The court heard that in October 2019, 2GB broadcaster Ray Hadley told C that FitzSimons was researching a story about Jones. C said he opened up to Hadley.
“I shut the doors to the rest of the office, and I said to Ray, ‘I know we joke a bit about it but some of the stuff he did to me was quite fucked up,” C told the court.
C then agreed to speak with FitzSimons on the condition he not be identified. After C spoke to the journalist, Hadley asked if he was okay.
“I just broke down sobbing, I said, ‘[Jones] is a fucking cunt, he’s just a cunt’,” C said.
C said he was thinking about his young baby at the time and it hit home.
“I’d never spoken about it in that way before, in that sort of detail where it wasn’t just an off-the-cuff conversation,” he told the court.
C said he asked McClymont not to use his name in her reporting because “a lot of this stuff is deeply embarrassing”.
C told the court he “hated reading these messages” when Wright showed him flirty messages he had sent Jones. He said he did it to “curry favour” with the broadcaster.
The trial before judge Glenn Walsh continues.
