A 30-year-old engineer has been jailed for 14 months after pleading guilty to one count of attempting, by threats or intimidation, to induce a woman to engage in an unlawful sexual act: he threatened to publish an intimate image unless she had sex with him once for free.
After she reported him, police arranged for her to meet him. Officers stopped him when he arrived; he tried to flee and was arrested 500 metres away. Police found a condom on him.
The acting judge said the condom showed the engineer was determined to go ahead and that he would have succeeded without police intervention. The judge warned that an intimate image posted online could spread widely and be difficult to remove completely, and said the woman’s distress was hard to imagine.