Angus Gottaas-Hughes faces ACT Supreme Court over rape, child abuse material crimes

The woman addressed Angus Miles Gottaas-Hughes directly in the ACT Supreme Court on Monday, telling the offender she would survive his actions but never fully recover.

She spoke as Gottaas-Hughes, 23, faced a sentence hearing in relation to seven serious sexual offences.

Gottaas-Hughes had previously pleaded guilty to the charges, which included sexual intercourse without consent and using a child to produce exploitation material.

Court documents show Gottaas-Hughes' nefarious activities were discovered in May 2021, when a foreign law enforcement agency detected him accessing child abuse material on the internet.

The matter was referred to local police, who seized three laptops and an iPhone when they raided his Ainslie home in December 2021.

Investigators identified 1381 files of child abuse material, including videos that ran for a combined duration of more than four days.

About half of the material was animated, but the rest depicted the sexual abuse of at least 200 real children.

Some of the most disturbing discoveries were made when police reviewed Gottaas-Hughes' phone and found videos he had personally filmed at his home in 2020.

They showed him, on three separate occasions, raping or indecently assaulting a teenage girl while she was asleep.

The victim, who is now a young adult, spoke on Monday about the disbelief she felt when two detectives knocked on her door to tell her what had happened.

"Immediately, I felt a type of surreal numbness, unlike anything I had ever felt," the victim told the court.

"This lasted for months and still resurfaces from time to time.

"It makes me feel inhuman and deeply soulless."

The victim described spending the next day tiptoeing around her home with a baseball bat and crying in the shower, covered in soap.

"No matter how much soap I used, I felt disgusting," she told Gottaas-Hughes.

"This wasn't my body anymore. You stole that from me."

Her partner also made a statement, repeatedly asking Gottaas-Hughes, who stared at the floor, "How did you not think twice?"

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Gottaas-Hughes wrote the victim a letter of apology, in which he described the hurt he had caused her as "unforgivable".

He acknowledged his actions had been "degrading".

"I sincerely apologise for taking advantage of you and filming my actions," the offender wrote.

Prosecutor Morgan Howe urged Justice Belinda Baker to impose a full-time custodial sentence.

He noted Gottaas-Hughes had been assessed as an above average risk of sexual recidivism.

Mr Howe also told the court Gottaas-Hughes had initially lied to police about his crimes.

The prosecutor said Gottaas-Hughes had falsely claimed he and the victim were "friends with benefits", and that she had "a kink for being touched while asleep".

Defence barrister Kieran Ginges told the court Gottaas-Hughes had "withdrawn into the internet" after being bullied at school, leading him to discover pornography and child abuse material at the age 12 or 13.

Mr Ginges said as Gottaas-Hughes grew into adulthood, his "psychosexual and social age" remained "frozen in time".

The barrister argued Gottaas-Hughes' immaturity and sexual inexperience had therefore played a role in the "opportunistic" sexual assaults of the sleeping victim, who had sometimes stayed at his home.

Mr Ginges described his client's actions as "exploratory".

"It's not predatory behaviour," defence counsel told the court.

Mr Ginges ultimately asked Justice Baker not to lock Gottaas-Hughes up, arguing the offender and society would both benefit from him attending "intensive therapy" that was not available behind bars.

Justice Baker indicated she would sentence Gottaas-Hughes, who is currently on bail, on April 21.

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