![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/8df06938ae7425a06d6c5ae811581882.jpeg\")
<\/p>\nAn author whose novel described two adults engaging in child role play has avoided jail after a judge ruled some passages amounted to child sex abuse material.<\/p>\n
Lauren Mastrosa, who wrote the novel titled Daddy’s Little Toy and recalled it after a brief early release, was sentenced to an 18-month community corrections order in Blacktown Local Court on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
She has also been placed on the NSW Child Protection Register for eight years.<\/p>\n
The novel reportedly details a consensual relationship between an 18-year-old female protagonist and her father’s 45-year-old friend, the desires he had for her when she was a child, and passages where she role-plays as a toddler.<\/p>\n
Mastrosa was charged with produce, possess, and disseminate child abuse material in March last year, later pleading not guilty to three offences.<\/p>\n
The 34-year-old from Quakers Hill was found guilty of them in February.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Lauren Mastrosa declined to comment as she left court. (AAP: Dan Himbrechts)<\/p>\n
‘Explicit and graphic’ content<\/p>\n
Judge Bree Chisholm said Mastrosa set out to deliberately write a novel where the “core purpose” was to fetishise young children so that it could be sold “for a commercial purpose”.<\/p>\n
“The character was fictional and, from the beginning of the book, was set out as an 18-year-old woman, but \u2026 [she] played a role-playing character that was clearly a very young child,” she said.<\/p>\n
“The nature was explicit and graphic.<\/p>\n
“The scenario were words, but there were many of them. The descriptions went for chapters.<\/p>\n
“It was very sexual, and the child was very young.”<\/p>\n
‘Unusual case’<\/p>\n
As the judge handed down the sentence, Mastrosa sat motionless at the rear of the courtroom.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Clad in all black, she clutched the hand of her husband, casting her eyes mostly downward or closing them altogether for long stretches.<\/p>\n
She declined to comment when approached by the ABC.<\/p>\n
Judge Chisholm described the case as “unusual”, acknowledging the relevant law had recently been amended by the NSW parliament to broaden the definition of child sex abuse material.<\/p>\n
“This is an unusual case\u2026 I have very little in case law to guide me,” she said.<\/p>\n
Arguments made by representatives of the state and the defence assisted her, she said.<\/p>\n
NSW Director of Public Prosecution, Milijana Masanovich, told the court the book was written over months, and the graphic descriptions could “normalise sexual conduct against minors”.<\/p>\n
“While the book is a fictional one, the visual the book created in the reader’s mind was in fact a three-year-old child engaging in a sexual activity,” she said.<\/p>\n
‘She’s not a paedophile’<\/p>\n
Barrister Margaret Cunneen SC, representing Mastrosa, told the court her client did not know she was breaking the law, noting she circulated copies to editors.<\/p>\n
“She was planning to write an erotic book, she wasn’t planning to create child abuse material,” she said.<\/p>\n
“She’s not a paedophile\u2026There is no child that’s been abused.”<\/p>\n
Ms Cunneen said Mastrosa had already been socially punished following the hearings and media coverage, claiming she had received death threats, lost her job and been banned from banking.<\/p>\n
She also told the court the writing of the novel was a creative outlet for Mastrosa, who had gone through multiple miscarriages and a thyroid cancer diagnosis.<\/p>\n
“She wrote herself to escape psychological distress,” she said.<\/p>\n
The defence asked the court to consider not recording a conviction, keeping Mastrosa off the child protection registry, so that she could attend events like school pick-up with her children.<\/p>\n
The judge said the court had to send the message that there was no commercial benefit to be made from the fetishisation of children.<\/p>\n
“The nature of the material is such that I cannot justify a non-conviction ever being appropriate,” she said.<\/p>\n
“[Mastrosa] made a mistake, but we’re all responsible for the mistakes that we make.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An author whose novel described two adults engaging in child role play has avoided jail after a judge…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":636969,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[308302,308303,308304,43,308306,44,2733,308305,198757,198758,5847,161246,110922,182874,41,39,42,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-636968","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-erotic-fiction-author","9":"tag-erotic-fiction-author-charged","10":"tag-erotic-fiction-author-child-abuse-material","11":"tag-headlines","12":"tag-lauren-mastrosa","13":"tag-news","14":"tag-nsw","15":"tag-nsw-author-charged","16":"tag-nsw-court","17":"tag-nsw-crime","18":"tag-nsw-news","19":"tag-sydney-court","20":"tag-sydney-crime","21":"tag-sydney-news","22":"tag-top-news","23":"tag-top-stories","24":"tag-topnews","25":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636968","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=636968"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636968\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/636969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=636968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=636968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=636968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}