The Times- Voyeurs filmed 5,000 teenagers in swimming pool changing rooms
Voyeurs filmed 5,000 teenagers in swimming pool changing rooms
A gang of voyeurs hid in mixed-gender changing rooms at swimming pools to secretly film more than 5,000 young women getting undressed, a court heard.
Adam Dennis, 39, and Robert Morgan, 33, boasted of “hunting” teenage victims and made catalogues of their pictures to share and trade online.
Inner London crown court heard that the gang used hidden cameras to observe women in pools in east London and Surrey between April 2013 and November 2017. A fellow voyeur, Declan Golden, fled to the United States, while Miguel Jose Sainz’s whereabouts are unknown.
Judge Benedict Kelleher sentenced Dennis, a husband and father of a 19-month child from Littlehampton, West Sussex, to 22 months in prison. Morgan, from Hammersmith, west London, who described himself as a part-time musician and senior webcast producer, was sentenced to 20 months’ imprisonment, suspended for two years.
Sainz was arrested in March 2017 after police seized thousands of pictures from his devices after a raid on his home. Downloads from those devices led the force to the three other gang members.
Kate Temple-Mabe, prosecuting, said that the defendants and their co-conspirators would hide in family or mixed-gender changing rooms and wait until someone — preferably a young woman — entered the cubicle next to theirs.
She said: “While that person was changing, the bag containing a hidden camera would be slid partway in the partition, allowing the camera which was set to record. They referred to this activity among themselves as ‘hunting’.”
The voyeurs would edit the films into short videos, which they would save for private viewing or to share with others. They would discuss tactics and strategies for obtaining the footage, including an interest known as “OTs”, a reference to older teenagers who were old enough to be post-pubescent but younger than 18.
A message from Dennis to Golden read: “I wish I could have seen some of my OTs from my school days as they were then.”
Golden replied: “I have another OT on the lower end of the spectrum if you know what I mean, not really my cup of tea but it might be good for trading material.”
Temple-Mabe told the court that they delved into the personal information and social media profiles of swimming club members, assembling what they termed “profile documents”. These documents included images of the members alongside their voyeuristic shots.
Farrhat Arshad KC, defending Morgan, said that her client was a “very much vulnerable person” who had been abandoned by his parents.
She said: “His parents had left him to his own devices. He’d gone to boarding school and then gone off to college in Brighton. He was lonely, he was isolated.”
James McCrindell, defending Dennis, said: “Immediate custody will result not just in harm to the defendant, which may well be deserved, but significant harmful impact on his wife, but more particularly on the 19-month child which will just be making sense of the world around them.”
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