Judge says Luke Lazarus did not care ‘one way or another’ whether woman was consenting to sex

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

The son of a Sydney nightclub owner who raped a woman in a Kings Cross alleyway and then bragged about taking her virginity has been jailed for at least three years.



Luke Lazarus, 23, said he once had “the world at his feet” and could have been a CEO.



But on Friday he was told he would be jailed for sexually assaulting an 18-year-old woman at the back of his father’s Kings Cross club Soho in May 2013.

Lazarus sat in the dock and stared after the sentence was handed down. His parents, including his father, Andrew Lazarus, were in court.

In sentencing him, Judge Sarah Huggett found the offence was not premeditated but said he had been reckless.



“I am satisfied beyond reasonable doubt he must have realised there was a possibility she wasn’t consenting,” she told Sydney’s district court.

But she said he was “not caring in one way or another whether she was consenting”.

On the night the woman was assaulted, the court heard it was the first time she had gone to Kings Cross.

After entering Soho, Lazarus walked up to her, told her he was a part-owner in the venue and showed her a business card. He then asked if she would like to enter a VIP area before taking her into an alleyway out the back.

They kissed but when she said she wanted to go back to her friends he said: “No, stay.”

He pulled her stockings down, ignored a second request by her to leave and then demanded she stand in a way that he could force himself on her. Scared, she complied.

During the assault that followed, the woman told him she was a virgin.

When it was over Lazarus told her to add her name to a list of conquests that he had had.

He later texted a friend: “Sick night, took a chick’s virginity LOL so tight.”

“It was her right to kiss the accused and it was her right to say she wanted to return to her friend,” Judge Huggett said. “The offender ignored that.”

The judge said Lazarus had come from a privileged upbringing and had an inflated sense of entitlement and power when he was at the club.

But she found he had good prospects of rehabilitation, was unlikely to reoffend and was suffering from an adjustment disorder owing to a break-up in the weeks before the offence.

She sentenced him to a maximum of five years in jail. He will be eligible for release in March 2018.