A former junior sports coach who abused two dozen boys during a period of two decades in the Castlemaine area has again faced court after another victim came forward.
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Robert James O’Neill, 73, pleaded guilty in the County Court in Bendigo on Wednesday to three counts of indecent assault committed against a teenage boy in the mid-1970s.
The victim, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, is one of two dozen of O’Neill’s victims to have made complaints.
O’Neill was sentenced to 14 years and two months in prison in 2004 for offences against 23 other children between 1972 and 1993.
The court heard the latest victim, now aged in his 50s, “worshipped” O’Neill when he met him as a child due to his standing in the community and the assaults left him frightened and confused.
The first time the boy was assaulted, the court heard O’Neill saw him walking down the street and invited him to come to his house for beer, taking him there in his car.
The victim told police he was excited by the offer as he had never drank alcohol before and drank three beers at O’Neill’s house.
He said his next memory was of being on the couch with his shorts down where he was sexually assaulted, after which O’Neill told him: “I’m only mucking around mate”.
The court heard O’Neill continued to give the victim rides to and from sports venues in his a car after the first incident and assaulted him twice more at his house where he again plied the boy with beer.
“He still made me feel like I was worth something so I still went along,” the victim said.
O’Neill’s barrister Penny Marcou said while she did not seek to detract from the seriousness of the offending, his early guilty plea should be interpreted as an expression of remorse.
“Nothing I can say today can detract from the gravity of the offending and the ongoing distress it would have caused to his victim,” she said.
Ms Marcou said her client had suffered discomfort in prison following the fresh charges which had impeded his ability to apply for parole, but Judge Robert Dyer said the community may feel O’Neill was “the author of his own misfortune” in that regard.
However the judge accepted O’Neill had demonstrated “genuine remorse” in pleading guilty and sparing the victim a trial.
O’Neill will be sentenced in the County Court in Melbourne on August 18.