Former cop Glen Hulley, who helped arrest Ellis, is on a mission to stop child exploitation

Former cop Glen Hulley, who helped arrest Ellis, is on a mission to stop child exploitation

PAEDOPHILE Robert Fiddes Ellis, the 70-year-old Victorian man described as Bali’s worst Australian child sex offender, says his crimes are “nor serious” and he should avoid jail.

Speaking outside a sentencing hearing in Denpasar on Tuesday, Ellis told reporters that molesting girls aged between eight and 17 “was not a serious thing” and that he had “paid them generously”.

“I have settled with the girls completely,” Ellis said of his victims, who were mostly street children he lured to his home with gifts and cash.

Ellis, whose has narrowly avoided the death penalty or chemical castration for his crimes, claims he had a “grandfatherly affection” for his victims.

Promising them clothing, money, trips to the mall and even motorbikes, Ellis enticed at least 11 girls to his home in the central Balinese town of Tabanan.

Inside he would insist on bathing them, slapping them if they refused, and sexually molesting them if they didn’t.

Afterwards, Ellis would pay the girls 200 thousand rupiah ($20). If the girl agreed to spend the night there, she could earn up to two million rupiah ($200).

Arrested in January this year, Ellis has tearfully pleaded that the payments to the girls should equal restitution and he should not be punished with a prison sentence.

In a bizarre letter to the Denpasar District Court written in the third person, the expatriate Australian wrote “Mr Ellis is not the kind of man who deserves imprisonment”, Fairfax news reported.

“He paid the girls in full immediately after the liberties were taken and the law in full in his 16-week ordeal in the Polda remand cell.”

Because Ellis was arrested in January, he does not qualify for a new law for paedophiles introduced in Indonesia, which has outstripped Thailand and the Philippines as the preferred destination for Australian sex tourism.

In May, Indonesian president Joko Widodo announced, effective immediately, a law which allows judges to impose the death penalty or chemical castration in child rape cases.

The law is not retrospective, however Ellis has complained about the 16-year sentence proposed by prosecutors in his case.

Ellis has described his incarceration in Polda, the police headquarter’s cells in the Balinese capital Denpasar, as worse for him than others.

“No one dares to come and visit me. I have no hand phone [mobile] contact with anyone,” he wrote.

“My relatives feel I need another more competent psychiatric assessment before being sentenced.

Fairfax news reported that in one letter Ellis wrote that a 16-year sentence was “not God’s law” and that he specifically targeted girls in Indonesia because he couldn’t do so in Australia.

“I am solitary and unmarried and my sex instinct was not ministered to in my own country.

“In all probability my young friends desperately want me returned to them.”

Ellis was arrested in part due to the former Victorian police officer and “paedophile hunter”, Glen Hulley.

Mr Hulley is the founder of Project Karma, which works with police in southeast Asia to investigate crimes of child sexual abuse, exploitation and trafficking.

He described the Ellis case as “by far the worst case I’ve ever seen of an Australian committing this kind of offence in Bali”.

Balinese aid workers say that Ellis targeted street kids whose impoverished parents made them hustle for 50 thousand rupiah ($5) every day.

Ellis’s lawyer told the court that his client apologised to Balinese people and had cried because he had brought shame upon Australia.

He had admitted he was an “advanced paedophile” and suffered from a “chronic illness ... [that was] very difficult to treat”.

Prosecutors told the court Ellis should get 16 years because the number of victims was high and he had damaged the future of Indonesian children.

He will now be sentenced on October 25.