Marc Bargero: Ex-boxing champ appeals convictions for sexually assaulting 15yo

WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT

An ex-pro boxer jailed for raping a sleeping schoolgirl has made a bid for freedom as he appeals the convictions, arguing the judge did not properly consider all of the evidence.

Marc Bargero, 54, was sentenced to three years in prison with an 18-month non-parole period after he was found guilty of aggravated sexual intercourse without consent of a person younger than 16 and sexually touching a child.

Bargero was aged 50 when he abused the then-15-year-old girl.

In handing down his guilty verdict at the NSW District Court on March 10 last year, Judge Tim Gartelmann SC accepted Bargero kissed the child’s stomach and performed about three seconds of oral sex on her before she woke up in shock.

According to agreed facts, Bargero was at a woman’s home in Sydney’s northern beaches on June 6, 2020, when the victim — whom he had never met — arrived with some friends.

When the girl fell asleep in the loungeroom after drinking alcohol, Bargero carried her upstairs to a bed, where the sickening acts took place.

The child, who woke up mid-rape, ran downstairs crying and told her friend “that guy, um, he like ate me out, and, he’s disgusting, like I hate him”.

She also told her friend he “took her pants off” and she “woke up and had to be like ‘oh, I’ve got to go’ and acted like (I) just had to get out of the room and stuff”.

According to the facts, the group left the house and happened to find police at a nearby street. They stopped and told the officers what had happened.

In the following days, the child repeatedly told her friends how the night “doesn’t feel real”.

Now, Bargero is seeking to appeal his convictions.

In a transcript of a July 6 appeal hearing tendered to the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal, Bargero’s barrister David Randle told the court there is “no dispute that the applicant had engaged in what might be described as a highly shameful, even deviant, act, fully and always by his own admission”.

But he argued there was a “possibility” that the “totality” of what occurred was “sniffing”.

The court heard Bargero admitted he “sniffed” the girl’s vagina because he wanted to relive his first sexual experience, but told police he “doesn’t remember” if he touched it because he was so drunk.

In two police interviews — one recorded the day after the incident and another two weeks later — he said he could not remember exactly what happened because he was so drunk.

Asked in the second interview if he touched the girl’s vagina, he said: “I don’t think so” and “no, I hope f***ing not”.

Mr Randle told the court Bargero’s guilty verdict relied on the fact he did not categorically deny the acts to police, but argued he gave “another version” of events to others in which he did deny them.

This version, he argued, was not properly taken into account by Judge Gartelmann in his verdict.

“The applicant’s position is, and indeed has to be, that read as a whole there is at least the possibility that the applicant has categorically denied these allegations,” Mr Randle told the court.

He referred to a covertly recorded conversation with a friend on March 25, 2021, in which Bargero said: “I didn’t touch her” and “she reckons I was … licking her, but I wasn’t.”.

A separate friend gave evidence in the trial that Bargero said on his “mother’s grave, the clearer it becomes there was just the sniffing of the vagina, there’s none of this licking”.

But crown prosecutor Ms Miiko Kumar argued there was “no error” in Judge Gartelmann’s findings or how he dealt with Bargero’s version of events.

He submitted the evidence showed Bargero “had a lack of recollection of doing either act rather than the recollection that he did not do it”.

“The judge had to be convinced beyond reasonable doubt of the complainant’s account … and he was so satisfied. His Honour found that the complainant’s account was compelling and his Honour found that it was consistent”.

At the height of his career, Bargero was among Australia’s top boxers, taking on international stages and fighting Anthony Mundine in 2001.

Among the string of titles he collected between 1994 to 2010 were the Australian light heavyweight, Australian middleweight and Asia Pacific light heavyweight titles.

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He was nicknamed “Working Class Man”.

Justice Jeremy Kirk, Justice Stephen Rothman and Justice Natalie Adams reserved their judgment on Bargero’s conviction appeal for a later date.

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