AUSTRALIA
The Guardian
Bridie Jabour
@bkjabour
Monday 27 April 2015
A former teacher at Sydney’s prestigious Knox Grammar school who was suspected of assaulting a student in his bed has told an abuse inquiry he did not attend when called to its hearings in February because he is a “private man”.
Christopher Fotis, 52, took the stand at a reconvened hearing of the royal commission into institutional responses to child sex abuse on Tuesday.
He denied ever hearing about the sexual assault of a student in 1988 which became known as the “balaclava man incident”. He told the commission the first he heard of it was from the hearings.
The commission had heard Fotis was a resident master at MacNeil house at the time and was widely suspected as the person seen running away from the house in an old Knox tracksuit and balaclava, after a student, known as ARN, had his genitals groped by the same man who was lying beneath his bed.
A warrant was issued for the arrest of Fotis in February when he failed to appear at the commission after being summoned but Fotis’s counsel, Margaret Bateman, said he was not served with a summons.
“I was a free man, legally entitled to move about anywhere I wanted. I’m a private person, this is a very public hearing and I suppose if any reason, it comes down to that,” he said when asked by counsel assisting the commission, David Lloyd, if there was any reason he did not appear.
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