Justice James MacGillivray ultimately agreed that a sentence of preventive detention was needed to protect the community.
It means Moonie will stay in prison indefinitely unless he can convince the Parole Board that he has changed.
The judge described it not as a punishment but as “the sentence most likely to promote your meaningful engagement in treatment”.
‘Cockroach’
Moonie’s first sentence for sexual offending was in 2012, when he was ordered to serve 10 months’ home detention for possession of objectionable publications depicting child sexual abuse.
But in reality, he had been committing crimes for more than three decades at that point. In 2021, his history caught up with him as he was sentenced to six years and five months’ imprisonment for a raft of sexual offences between 1980 and 2019.
“What a vile, sick paedophile he was,” victim Roger Allison said at Moonie’s 2021 sentencing, referring to him as a “cockroach”, but also saying he forgave him.
Wayne Moonie appears in the dock for sentencing in Auckland District Court in 2021. Photo / John Weekes
The abuse began when Allison was 13. Moonie would have been 18 or 19 at the time.
“Every last little bit of the world that I’d known was gone,” Allison said. “I became a commodity … just another innocent, trusting young boy.”
Two other victims, abused by Moonie a decade later, were 10 and 11. Then, in 2009, Moonie made contact with a 14-year-old from Otago through an illegal chatroom catering to men interested in underage boys. He sent the boy about 200 child sexual abuse images and arranged to meet up, but the boy’s parents found out and intervened.
In 2010, Moonie was found in possession of a large amount of child sexual exploitation images and videos retrieved from the dark web, resulting in his home detention sentence. His illegal online activity resumed from 2016 to 2019, when he sent about 15,000 messages to children and posted 16,000 images on a dark web chat site.
“When he doesn’t have the opportunity [to abuse children in person], he resorts to online offending,” the prosecutor said this week. “There is a clear pattern of serious offending in this case.”
‘Devastating impact’
Allison, the first victim, lobbied the court in 2021 to lift his automatic name suppression. Moonie’s other victims, however, do not want to be named. The victim referred to in this week’s sentencing watched the hearing silently from a conference room inside a prison, where he is also serving a sentence.
He submitted a victim impact statement to the court, but did not want it read aloud. In summarising the statement, Justice MacGillivray said it “explains in really heart-rending terms the devastating impact … it’s had on his life”.
Prosecutors said that Moonie’s crimes against the victim went some way towards explaining how he ended up on a trajectory that led to prison.
He had been repeatedly targeted by Moonie for several years in the late 2000s, starting at age 10 or 11 when Moonie showed him pornography and committed indecent acts. Other instances included being abused while on a chatroom live feed in front of a camera set up in a bedroom, where Moonie and another man referred to only as “Matthew” took turns abusing him.
After that video was made, the court was told, Moonie would threaten to show it to the boy’s father if he refused further sexual demands.
The victim looked down at the floor and bounced his knee as the judge recounted the crimes.
From abused to abuser
Defence lawyer Susan Giles pointed out that Moonie also had been a victim of childhood abuse, which she suggested led to his own offending starting when he was still barely an adult.
Moonie has consented to the Herald reporting on his accusations, which are self-reported and did not go through the court system, to better understand how his crimes were part of a cycle.
Child sex offender Wayne Gillman Moonie in the High Court at Auckland this month. He has now been sentenced to preventive detention. Photo / Craig Kapitan
There was severe and prolonged emotional and physical abuse in the home, then he was targeted for sexual abuse through a sporting club, he reported. He left home at 13 and lived on the streets, where men would at times give him food and a place to stay in exchange for sexual favours.
Had Moonie received a normal finite sentence, he would have received a 10% discount for his own childhood victimisation and deprivation.
Giles argued that preventive detention was “neither necessary nor justified in this case”, noting that Moonie had taken an important first step of accepting that he was attracted to young boys.
“What we have here is a willingness to address the underlying cause of the offending,” she said, suggesting that an extended supervision order at the completion of his sentence – allowing for an additional 10 years of parole-like conditions – would adequately address the risk to the community.
“We accept there is a pattern of serious offending,” Giles added. “That has de-escalated over the years. The contact offending is now over 17 years [ago].”
But Justice MacGillivray disagreed that there were signs of de-escalation. For the most part, Moonie had either been in prison or under court supervision for the past 17 years, making it more difficult to find victims in person, but he still had a prolific presence online, the judge noted.
‘Exaggeration and lies’
Before determining whether Moonie should receive preventive detention, the judge first had to decide what finite sentence would otherwise be appropriate. But that, too, wasn’t a straightforward process.
Justice MacGillivray had to combine the conduct from the 2021 sentencing with the latest convictions and determine what overall sentence Moonie might have received had all his offending been known at that time. He then needed to cancel Moonie’s current sentence and credit him for the five years and two months he has already served.
The judge settled on a combined starting point of 15 years, resulting in a final sentence of eight years and four months when factoring in the childhood deprivation reduction and time served.
Justice James MacGillivray. Photo / Michael Craig
But that sentence would not be appropriate given the ongoing risk to the community, the judge concluded, describing Moonie as someone who has “consistently engaged in serious offending through your adult life”.
The judge pointed to a psychiatric report noting that, when Moonie was asked about the current charges, he responded with a “mix of exaggeration, lies and only some truth”.
“Your minimisation of the offending and your denial of the offending points itself to an increased risk,” the judge said. “The present reality is that the complete lack of acceptance or insight … is likely to prove a fundamental barrier to effective treatment.”
In addition to preventive detention, the judge ordered a minimum period of imprisonment of five years before Moonie can begin asking for parole.
Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.
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