By The Guardian (World News) | Created at 2024-09-27 16:20:12 | Updated at 2024-10-05 03:17:32
1 week ago
A “depraved and selfish” former councillor who filmed 28 women in bathrooms and bedrooms using hidden cameras over a period of almost 15 years has been jailed for six years and two months.
Bradford crown court heard emotional statements from many of the women targeted by Robert Holden, 51, describing how his “perverted fetish” had left them feeling “violated, disgusted and mortified” and in many cases had wrecked their lives.
The judge Sophie McKone described Holden’s actions as “voyeurism on a vast scale” after she heard on Friday how an investigation uncovered hundreds of recordings of an intimate nature, including of women taking showers, engaged in sexual activity, on the toilet or getting undressed.
Some women had been recorded over lengthy periods, one of them for more than 12 years.
Going through each victim’s experience in turn, the judge said of one: “You recorded her in virtually every act she was doing, including sexual acts.”
One woman was recorded “on countless occasions”, sometimes with her very young daughter, and police later found that her mother had also been filmed by Holden, who was a Conservative and, later, independent member of Calderdale council.
Another victim was just 16 at the time he filmed her showering. McKone said of this woman: “She felt violated, disgusted and mortified, and her main emotion is pure anger.”
The judge noted how Holden, who ran an IT business, kept huge numbers of these recordings on his devices, neatly labelled in files.
McKone said Holden even turned to some of the women involved for comfort after he was arrested and attempted suicide, only for them to find out later that he had filmed them too.
She said: “This was voyeurism on a vast scale – not just in terms of the number of victims, or the length of time it went on for, but in terms of the number of times you watched a particular victim. It’s hard to think of a worse breach of trust.”
The judge said Holden, in his own words, did it “to get a cheap thrill” but said he could not properly explain why he had done it. She said he was “depraved and selfish” and had “hid behind a veil of respectability”.
Many of the women’s personal statements were read to the court on Friday and one woman faced Holden to read it herself.
One said Holden had “completely violated my privacy and my trust” and she now realised he had groomed her “for his own perverted fetishes”.
Another woman said she had been left unable to trust anyone and she was now living as a virtual recluse.
Another said Holden’s actions had led to series of problems in her life, including losing her children and her job, adding: “My life has fallen apart. I’ve lost everything.”
Holden was arrested in 2020 after a woman discovered a recording device in a bedroom in a property in West Yorkshire. He fled the country to the west African island of Cape Verde, only returning after a lengthy extradition battle.
Jane Greenhalgh, defending, read to the court a letter of apology from her client, which said: “I abused that trust in the most abhorrent way imaginable,” and “I barely recognise the person that I have turned into.”
Greenhalgh told the judge: “There’s no conceivable explanation I can advance for his behaviour.” She said: “Through me, he expresses his remorse to all of the people who have been damaged by this case.”
The barrister said Holden would now be remembered for these offences rather than the “infinite good deeds” he had performed as a councillor over many years. She said his reputation was “in tatters” and that this was “punishment in itself for a man of his previous standing”. “This is a tragic fall from grace,” Greenhalgh said.
Holden, of Sowerby Bridge, West Yorkshire, admitted 31 counts of voyeurism and seven counts of computer misuse at a previous hearing, and a charge of failing to surrender to custody.
The computer misuse charges followed the discovery by police that he had abused the trust of customers of his IT business by copying information and images from devices left with him.
