Butler testifies Jones greeted athlete with 'hug and slap on bottom'

David Allan spent eighteen and a half years inside Alan Jones's life, moving through the broadcaster's luxury apartment at Circular Quay with the quiet authority of someone who knows where everything belongs. He cooked. He cleaned. He ironed socks and underpants. He polished shoes and scrubbed toilets. He watched his employer survive on two and a half hours of sleep a day, a man running on fumes and ambition. When Allan took the stand at the Downing Centre court in Sydney this week, he brought with him the accumulated weight of nearly two decades of domestic observation—the kind of knowledge that only a butler possesses, the small rituals and repeated gestures that fill a house when no one is watching.

The trial is now in its eighth week. Jones, eighty-five years old, faces twenty-one charges of indecent assault and sexual touching. He has pleaded not guilty to all of them. Allan was called to testify about what he witnessed during the visits of a prominent athlete, referred to in court as complainant M, who has alleged that Jones touched him without consent on two separate occasions. The athlete himself had already testified that Jones would greet him with a hug and a kiss on the cheek, using flattering language—"champion," "beautiful man"—the kind of words that can mean nothing or everything, depending on what comes next.

When prosecutor Georgina Wright asked Allan how Jones greeted the athlete upon arrival at the apartment, the butler's answer was direct: a hug and a slap on the bottom, followed by "Hello, champion." Then they would sit and talk. Allan paused after delivering this detail, seeming to recognize the weight of it. "Probably the wrong thing to say today, isn't it?" he offered, a small acknowledgment of how the world had shifted around such gestures. The athlete, Allan said, visited on eight or nine occasions. He was one of many. The apartment hosted cricketers, swimmers, rugby players—a steady stream of young men in their twenties, all moving through Jones's world. Allan named some of them: Brett Lee, Steve Waugh, Freddie Flintoff, Nick Farr-Jones, Johnathan Thurston. The place functioned as a kind of salon for Australian sport.

Allan's employment had begun simply enough. He remembered Jones asking him during the interview: "Can you knock up a few sandwiches?" Allan replied, "Crust on or crust off?" That was the entire negotiation. What followed was a life of escalating demands. Once Jones discovered that Allan could boil an egg, the entertaining began. Lunches became dinners. Dinners became Sunday roasts. Weekends filled with Saturday breakfasts when Jones was off air. The broadcaster maintained what Allan described as "a very hard, extraordinarily brutal regime of work hours," and his butler moved through it all, present but peripheral, always working, never sitting down to eat.

Allan recalled seeing Jones with a young male athlete at the apartment between 2003 and 2005. He said roughly half a dozen young athletes were regular visitors during that period. But when the defence barrister Claire O'Neill pressed him during cross-examination—asking whether he had witnessed any inappropriate behaviour by Jones toward a male athlete between 2003 and 2006—Allan was unequivocal. "No, I can't say I did," he said. "No no, no." His testimony offered a greeting, a pattern, a domestic context. It did not offer proof of harm.

Five men have come forward to allege that Jones touched them sexually without consent between 2003 and 2020. The trial will hear from the final complainant, known as A, when proceedings resume on Monday, October 6. The court has been sitting for eight weeks. Jones remains in the dock, eighty-five years old, denying everything. And Allan, the man who knew the texture of his employer's daily life better than almost anyone, has given his account and stepped down. The trial continues.