Convicted child sex offender faces new trial

Convicted child sex offender faces new trial

Robert George Carrel is standing trial accused of a string of sexual offences against a girl under the age of ten.

The charges date back around 30 years.

The 63-year-old, who now lives in the UK, allegedly took his victim to his flat where he forced her to touch him sexually – before rewarding her with ‘presents and sweets’.

At the first day of his Assize trial, the jury of eight women and four men heard from the alleged victim who said that Mr Carrel groomed her and that she ‘trusted him’.

She said: ‘At first I think he lured me in with a false sense of security. I trusted him.

‘At the time I thought he cared about me and I didn’t understand what was going on. I wanted to believe he did care.

‘He would take me to the bathroom. He used to make me do things and tell me I was a good girl and I would get rewarded with presents and sweets.’

She said she specifically remembered receiving a ‘teddy bear with a red love heart’ as a present following one of the occasions on which she was abused.

‘When I look at it as an adult, he saw a young girl and took her home and he knew what he was doing and he groomed me,’ she said.

‘I got abused and my life was ruined from that. I wasn’t safe anymore. He took my innocence.’

The court heard that Mr Carrel had been imprisoned in the UK for a separate ‘child-sex conviction’.

Advocate James Bell, defending, said that the alleged victim in this case did not make a report to the police
until after Mr Carrel had been released from a UK prison.

He suggested the alleged victim had sought a ‘good person to blame’ for her personal problems and that the abuse she suffered had in fact been at the hands of a different man.

The woman said: ‘I have not passed the blame onto someone else. I would not send an innocent man to jail.’

Outlining the case, Crown Advocate Richard Pedley, prosecuting, said that Mr Carrel had been returned to Jersey on an arrest warrant.

He said: ‘The term used is historic sexual abuse. I would suggest that when you hear the live evidence, it does not feel historic.

‘Memories, as you know, are not necessarily linear. But you remember the most significant things in your life.’

Commissioner Julian Clyde-Smith was presiding. The trial continues.

– Advertisement –
– Advertisement –