A senior adviser to former Liberal MP Craig Kelly would take a young female staff member into Kelly’s personal office and close the door, before kissing her cheek and groping her breasts and bottom, a Sydney court has heard.
Francesco “Frank” Zumbo, 55, has pleaded not guilty to 20 charges, including sexual touching and indecent assault, related to accusations made by five women between 2014 and 2020.
One of those women, whose identity cannot be revealed, told Sydney’s Downing Centre local court on Monday she felt deeply uncomfortable about Zumbo’s consistent advances and repeatedly told him he was making her feel uncomfortable. She told him: “I do not consent.”
At the end of every day working in Kelly’s office, Zumbo would take the witness into Kelly’s office and close the door, she told the court.
“I would be called into the office, he’d say ‘I’d like to say goodbye to you’,” the woman said. “He would then essentially go in for a hug and then slip his hand on to my breast and kiss my cheek at the same time. Some of those times he would also grab my bottom and squeeze it, but mainly it was the caressing of the breast that would happen every time. I didn’t like it, and I felt really weird about it.”
If she was wearing a jumper or a jacket, Zumbo would “slip his hand under” her outer layer of clothing and touch her breast through her shirt, the court heard.
The woman told the court that when she tried to tell Zumbo she felt uncomfortable, he told her “this is how I show love and how I show affection and if you get a boyfriend you’ve got to be prepared for these sorts of interactions”.
She said he would “squeeze or caress” her breast for between 10 or 15 seconds each time.
The prosecutor, Shaun Croner, told the court that as well as touching her breasts, the woman would allege Zumbo also touched her vagina and kissed her on the lips. Zumbo has denied these claims.
The witness first met Zumbo when he visited her school in Sydney, alongside Kelly, then the Liberal party member for Hughes. The witness volunteered when Zumbo asked for students willing to assist in Kelly’s office. “I was interested in politics and it sounded really fun,” she said.
After her internship – and after she had left school and begun studying at university – Zumbo offered the witness a part-time paid role working in Kelly’s electorate office. As office manager, Zumbo was the witness’s direct boss.
Croner played the court a 45-minute recording secretly made by the witness in Kelly’s office in December 2015. In it, Zumbo dominates a conversation in which the witness speaks only a handful of sentences.
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Zumbo spoke about his management of Kelly’s office, his philosophy on life, his political enemies, and his growing “love” for the witness.
“I just hope that one day you can relate to me as a person rather than just an older guy … a person who loves you very much and who cares about you.
“I’m falling in love with you … I’m falling in love with you as a person.”
In the conversation, Zumbo repeatedly tells the witness she is his favourite of “the sisters”, a collective term he used for the women employed in Kelly’s office.
“I admire you, I adore you, you’re everything I look for in a woman. Intelligent, good-looking, bright, loyal to me.”
Zumbo told the witness, an observant Christian, he was fulfilling “the Lord’s mission” in mentoring her.
“I’m pushing you to perfection. I’m pushing you to serve the Lord,” he told the then teenager.
In the conversation, Zumbo also referred to his own career as one where he had achieved at the “highest levels in everything that I’ve done”. But he had also endured setbacks, he said.
“I should have been a full professor, they stopped me. I should have been chairman of the ACCC, they stopped me. What’s left for me is to be a member of parliament.”
The witness told the court she knew it was unlawful to secretly record their conversation, “because I didn’t have his consent”. But she said she felt compelled to record him after other women in the office told her they were doing it, and that she thought “no one would ever believe if I told them what conversations with Frank were like”.
‘There were conversations that sometimes made me quite scared because he got quite angry,” she told the court. “He would just berate me in long-winded conversations, so I decided that I would record some of those conversations, because I was quite scared that something would happen, and I wanted to have some proof of what happened.”
She told the court she had developed a dependence on Zumbo and he would help edit her university essays.
She told the court that, as a first-year university student, “I very quickly grew a dependence upon his help, thinking that I couldn’t do it without him … I didn’t know anything outside his help”.
She said she later tried to “distance” herself from Zumbo. The court was presented with a series of messages sent between Zumbo and the witness after she declined his offer of further academic help.
“I didn’t really like what was going on in the office … he essentially said ‘you’re rejecting my friendship, do you want this friendship to continue?’
“I was quite reliant on his help and his advice, so it was my attempt to create some distance, by being able to do the assignments on my own.”
The woman’s evidence will continue Tuesday. She is the third of five women scheduled to testify before magistrate Gareth Christofi.
