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He planted secret bathroom cams and filmed his friends, lovers

Author
Open Justice,
Publish Date
Thu, 30 Mar 2023, 11:56AM
Greg Park in the dock at the Manukau District Court. Photo / Sylvie Whinray
Greg Park in the dock at the Manukau District Court. Photo / Sylvie Whinray

He planted secret bathroom cams and filmed his friends, lovers

Author
Open Justice,
Publish Date
Thu, 30 Mar 2023, 11:56AM

A young man planted hidden cameras and filmed more than a dozen friends and lovers using the bathroom, uploading the videos onto the internet.

Greg Park, 24, was sentenced at the Manukau District Court today to 10 months of home detention.

One victim told the court how she and other victims scrolled through porn sites looking for images that could be them, and feared that random men would recognise them from the shower videos Park took of them and posted online.

“There’s no price you can pay that will ever erase that,” she said.

Prosecution said Park should be jailed, pointing to the volume of offending, the premeditation and planning involved, and the impact on the young women - especially those whose videos were posted on the internet.

“Only a sentence of imprisonment can adequately deter and denounce offending of this type and scale,” Sergeant Paul Watkins said.

Judge Jane Forrest said it was in society’s interest that Park was sentenced to home detention so he could continue his rehabilitation.

Psychological reports said he would struggle to cope in prison, which would interrupt the therapy he started shortly after he was charged.

Gross breach of privacy

Court documents show Park knew all 16 of his victims, some of whom saw him as a close friend and confidante, Judge Forrest said at a hearing in November.

“Here the abuse of trust is significant,” she said of the recordings, calling them a “gross or extreme” breach of the women’s privacy.

It started when he was as young as 16 or 17, according to a court summary.

Park met his first victim in high school and between 2016 and 2017, secretly took 100 photos and videos of her.

He would approach her with his phone pretending to be texting while taking close-up shots of her clothed breasts and buttocks.

He later edited these photos, adding images of penises or semen on and around her face.

He even installed a hidden camera at her grandmother’s house to film her showering and using the toilet.

The bulk of his offending took place in 2021, when he was 22.

Park was in university and had a leading role in a student association at the time, organising trips and social gatherings for members.

On two such trips, one at a campsite and another at an AirB’n’b, he arrived early and set up hidden cameras in the bathrooms, filming his victims showering and using the toilet.

He uploaded four of the bathroom videos to various Asian fetish porn sites, later found by the victims.

He also planted hidden cameras around a Christchurch motor lodge room where he was staying and filmed himself and a Tinder date having sex.

Police searched Park’s home in December 2021 and seized his hidden camera devices, a laptop, a cellphone and several USBs and micro SD cards.

The court today ordered the devices to be destroyed.

“Not only did you get people’s trust, but you clearly went about placing filming devices in personal spaces in advance of times when people would use those,” Judge Forest said.

The victims suffered depression and anxiety and some had to get medical help.

Park’s lawyer Anoushkha Bloem had asked for a discount for his previous good character - he has no prior court history - but was declined on this point.

Judge Forrest said this was his first time before the courts, but “when offending commences in 2017... I certainly would not call it good character”.

- Qiuyi Tan, Open Justice

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