A Sydney pizza shop worker who participated in the gang rape of a drugged teenager in the back of his restaurant has been jailed for at least eight years.
It took a jury just two hours to find Ricardo Audish, 42, guilty of three charges of aggravated sexual assault in company in a southern Sydney eatery in October 2016.
His victim has since suffered the overwhelming and long-term consequences of trauma leading to clinical depression and a suicide attempt where she was hospitalised for a month, the NSW District Court was told on Friday.
Judge David Arnott said the despicable criminal conduct involved the degrading sexual abuse of an intoxicated 18-year-old woman who was effectively ‘passed around’ the various men.
Ricardo Audish, 42, was found guilty of three charges of aggravated sexual assault in company in a southern Sydney eatery and jailed for 13 years
The woman had consented to sex with her boyfriend in a toilet cubicle, before he told her ‘all the other boys want to have sex with you now’, to which she replied ‘hell no’.
After she was given a bong that is suspected to have been spiked, Audish, who was 38 at the time, was the first of three men to have unprotected sexual intercourse with the woman who ‘did not and could not consent,’ given she was substantially intoxicated, Judge Arnott said.
CCTV footage showed her ‘sure-footed’ walking and sometimes jogging upstairs before the incident, compared to after where she is seen walking slowly, stumbling and leaning on a pole for 17 minutes to regain balance.
A passer-by later found the teenager on a road weeping, shaking and disorientated, and called emergency services.
READ RELATED: Police chiefs back medicinal cannabis cards for patients
She later revealed: ‘They all took turns in me,’.
The 42-year-old married man originally denied working at the time of the assault and later said the pair did not have intercourse, but a co-worker’s statement and forensic DNA evidence proved he was lying.
Judge Arnott found Audish has shown no remorse or contrition but that he has reasonable prospects of rehabilitation given the opportunistic nature of his offending.
Audish’s barrister, Greg James QC, submitted that he was suffering from PTSD at the time of the attack, having experienced a deprived and brutalised childhood in Iraq and that he was a ‘good family man’.
But his upbringing in Iraq does not make this offending more understandable, and his mental health issues were more likely due to his impending court trial, the judge said.
Audish was sentenced to a total term in prison of 13 years and will be first eligible for parole on December 24, 2028.
Lifeline 13 11 14
beyondblue 1300 22 4636
Source: Daily Mail
