Alleged grooming victim tells Jones court: 'I was shaped to accept this'

Alan Jones, the 85-year-old former broadcaster, sat in a Sydney courtroom this week as a man he once employed described a decade of alleged grooming that reshaped how the younger man thought about himself and his own boundaries. The complainant, identified in court as C, had been 18 when he started working at the 2GB radio station in the mid-2000s. A few years into that job, when he became Jones's driver, the unwanted touching began—a hand on his penis, a kiss without consent. Jones has pleaded not guilty to 22 charges of indecent assault and sexual touching involving six men across multiple years.

The defence strategy was straightforward: look at the text messages. In 2015, C had sent Jones a message saying "I'm a bachelor again. The Donkey is out"—a crude reference to his own body that he knew the older man would appreciate. Later exchanges showed both men discussing C's anatomy in explicit terms, with C himself sometimes initiating the banter. If Jones had truly assaulted this young man without consent, the defence barrister Gabrielle Bashir SC suggested, why would C continue to communicate with him this way? Why would he maintain the relationship after leaving his job? Why would he invite Jones to his wedding and thank him in his speech for a $2,000 cheque?

C's answer, delivered with visible strain during cross-examination, cut to something harder to quantify than text message timestamps. "These are messages consistent with someone who had been groomed for 10 years, to think this was an acceptable way to talk with him," he told the court. When pressed on why he would send sexually explicit messages to a man who had allegedly touched him without permission, C said simply: "I knew he would like to be spoken to like that." The logic was circular and suffocating—he had learned, over a decade, what Jones wanted to hear, and he had learned to provide it.

The age gap haunted every exchange. C was 40 years younger than Jones, working in an industry where the broadcaster wielded enormous power. When asked why he maintained contact after leaving his job as a driver, C explained that Jones remained "very, very powerful in our industry." To refuse him, to distance himself, to tell him he was uncomfortable—these carried professional risk. The messages C sent about missing Jones, about wanting to see his face, were not genuine sentiment, C testified. They were survival. "I never would have told Alan that I was uncomfortable and anxious," he said, because doing so would have meant getting "offside" with a man who could shape his career.

At one point during the testimony, Judge Glenn Walsh intervened. He had been counting. The defence barrister had put the same suggestion to C sixteen times: that the allegations were not true, that the messages proved consent, that the relationship was consensual. The repetition itself became part of the record—a kind of pressure applied in real time, in open court, asking the complainant to recant or crack under the weight of being told he was lying.

The court had previously heard that in October 2019, C finally told Ray Hadley, a rival broadcaster at 2GB, what had happened. Jones had kissed him. Jones had touched him. The words came out a decade after the unwanted contact began, after years of learning to speak in the language Jones had taught him. The trial continues, with the judge still presiding and the question of what grooming means—how it works, how it silences, how it makes a victim complicit in the appearance of his own abuse—still unresolved in the law's slow machinery.