A New South Wales (NSW) politician has been found guilty of sexually assaulting two young men in Australia.<\/p>\n
A jury found Gareth Ward – who is still a sitting member of state parliament – guilty of three counts of indecent assault and one count of rape.<\/p>\n
Both of the victims, who were aged 18 and 24, said they were assaulted at Ward’s home after meeting the 44-year-old through political circles between 2013 and 2015.<\/p>\n
Ward resigned as a state government minister and from the Liberal Party when the accusations emerged in 2021, but refused to leave parliament and was re-elected as the member for Kiama in 2023.<\/p>\n
The jury deliberated for three days after hearing nine weeks of evidence in the NSW District Court.<\/p>\n
The trial heard Ward had invited a drunk 18-year-old man to his home in 2013 and indecently assaulted him three times, despite his attempts to resist. <\/p>\n
Two years later, he raped a political staffer after an event at parliament.<\/p>\n
Ward had argued the 2015 rape didn’t happen, and that the other complainant was misremembering their encounter from 2013.<\/p>\n
But crown prosecutor Monika Knowles said the striking similarities in the accounts of the two men, who did not know each other, showed they were telling the truth.<\/p>\n
“Similar behaviour, similar setting, same man, same conclusion. This is not a coincidence,” crown prosecutor Monika Knowles told the trial, according to local media.<\/p>\n
Ward will return to court later this year to be sentenced.<\/p>\n
The NSW government had previously considered voting to expel Ward – who has been a state MP since 2011 – from parliament, but legal advice indicated it could risk prejudicing his trial.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A New South Wales (NSW) politician has been found guilty of sexually assaulting two young men in Australia.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20675,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-20674","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20674","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20674"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20674\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}