A young Aussie boxer who bashed a homosexual paedophile during a vigilante sting has been convicted and ordered to pay the elderly man $3,000.
Cooper Watt, 20, and two underage co-offenders posed as a 15-year-old boy on gay sex app Grindr and to lure the 70-year-old into meeting them at a park in Deception Bay, north of Brisbane, on January 27 last year.
The group then bashed the would-be predator while calling him a paedophile, forced him to drive to an ATM and withdraw $3,000, then made him drive them back to the park where they beat him again and stole his mobile phone.
Watt pleaded guilty to one count of robbery in company with personal violence in Brisbane Magistrates Court on Wednesday, was sentenced to two years’ jail with immediate parole, and ordered to pay the paedophile $3,000 in restitution, The Courier Mail reported.
Prosecutor Zachary Kaplan called the attack a “hate crime”, and blamed the so-called “manosphere” for inspiring young men to film themselves bashing and robbing child sex offenders for social media clout.
“It relates to what really is an epidemic in relation to young men consuming theatre online and being encouraged to take back society from these people, and in this situation, this defendant and his two co-offenders have done exactly that,” Mr Kaplan told Judge John Allen KC.
“Recently the documentarian Louis Theroux released a documentary called Inside The Manosphere, I’m not sure if your honour viewed it.
“It addresses influencers on social media platforms creating content where they lure what they consider to be paedophiles to a location, where they then extract vigilante justice.”
Defence barrister Kerala Drew told the court the attack was “an isolated, foolish incident committed by an 18-year-old boy”, and said her client had worked in aged care but had lost his blue card due to the incident.
Watt now worked for a building company where he was spoken higher of, and his role in the assault was lesser than his co-offenders, Ms Drew told the court, and asked the judge to sentence him to probation without a conviction.
Judge Allen said not recording a conviction would be “entirely inadequate” for general deterrence, and told Watt he faced harsher penalties than the two underage offenders due to his age.
“The offending was also serious in that it was targeted against a person by reasons of his sexuality and it’s not justified by any vigilante motive,” he said.
Header image: Left, right, Cooper Watt (Facebook, Instagram).
