In short:
A report handed down into disgraced former Senior Sergeant Paul Reynolds has highlighted the way his standing in the community was used as a tool to groom more than 50 boys over three decades.
Report author Regina Weiss described Reynolds’ conduct as the ‘most prolific grooming’ by one person she’d seen in nearly 20 years of work in the field.
What’s next?
Ms Weiss says recognising grooming red flags is vital, with keeping children safe a responsibility of the whole community.
After Senior Sergeant Paul Reynolds took his own life in 2018, hundreds of people lined Launceston’s Elizabeth Street to pay their respects.
WARNING: This story contains details of sexual abuse which may cause distress.
But the majority of the crowd didn’t know he’d been using his standing in the community to groom more than 50 boys over three decades.
Former war crimes prosecutor Regina Weiss, the author of an independent review into Reynolds’ conduct, said Reynolds perpetrated the “most prolific grooming” by one individual that she’d seen in nearly 20 years working on sexual and gender-based violence.
“He was a master at it. He groomed victims, he groomed their parents, he groomed the communities, the sporting clubs,” she said.
“He groomed his own colleagues, some of whom are devastated … they worked alongside someone and didn’t see it.”
The report paints a horrifying picture of how Reynolds used his position of respect in the football community and as a police officer again and again to earn and then betray the trust of young people and those who cared about them.
And, how he cast a spell on his fellow police officers to avoid detection.
Ms Weiss argues that understanding how Reynolds groomed victims is crucial to ensuring it doesn’t happen again.
“If there’s one key takeaway from this report and the report we’ve done it’s that it’s a community responsibility to look after our children,” she said.
“It’s the responsibility of parents and guardians and grandparents and bystanders to recognise what grooming looks like and to report it and to safeguard our children.”
Sport used to seek out victims
Reynolds met most of his victims through basketball and football, where he was a coach and briefly president of the Northern Tasmanian Football Association.
Widely renowned as an excellent football coach, Reynolds used his standing and his position as a senior police officer to befriend, groom and abuse young boys.
Ms Weiss went through thousands of text messages Reynolds sent boys and young men in the years before his death, finding his pattern of grooming and abuse was “considered and targeted”, often directed at boys without male role models.
In the years before his death he went to almost all the Deloraine Football Club’s games and was always in the change rooms, often giving pre-game rub-downs to young players, despite having no links to the club.
One man, who was 15 when he met Reynolds through football, told the review the police officer was “always around, always friendly to us young guys”.
“He was also at basketball and that, everyone knew who he was. He was so very funny, the funniest bloke I’ve ever met. I was drawn to him straightaway,” he said.
Another man who Reynolds coerced to send a picture of his penis when he was 15 and often received explicit messages, told the review Reynolds did “so much good for me. He helped with football. He took me to footy training.”
At the heart of it all was “banter”.
He used a teenage-like communication style, slapped boys in their genital region, and told them graphic stories about his sex life.
He won boys over. One victim-survivor described Reynolds as “my best friend”.
“He was always crude and sexual in the way he spoke but he was the funniest man I knew. I trusted him — I thought he was the best bloke ever,” he told the review.
The graphic below illustrates how Reynolds went about grooming boys and young men.
Families, community also targeted
He also groomed the families of the teenage boys he was targeting.
He told them he had experience in sports massage, offering to massage their children or give them special coaching.
The parents felt their children were safe with Reynolds, given his position as a police officer and in the sporting community, often expressing gratitude for his assistance.
The broader community was also under Reynolds’ spell.
“He would shake everyone’s hand, he would know everyone. People at the football wanted to be around Paul,” someone who knew him from football administration told the review.
One police officer said Reynolds made “an overwhelming first impression”.
“He could tell jokes like no other — three-minute monologues followed by a punchline. I thought this guy was incredible,” he said.
Ms Weiss said he ingratiated himself so convincingly as an upstanding member of the policing and sporting communities that some members of the small communities he lived in “to this day do not accept or believe that Reynolds had been capable of grooming and sexually abusing children.”
Reynolds leveraged police position as grooming tool
Reynolds didn’t just use his charisma and reputation. He told people, particularly young men he was grooming, that he had lots of influence in the police force.
He bragged that he could help the father of one of the teenage boys in his company to get out of jail on parole.
Ms Weiss highlighted a particularly horrific example that occurred sometime between 2011 and 2015, when he visited the house of a man who considered him to be a friend and mentor.
Reynolds was holding what looked like a police report or complaint about him, and told the young man he “can make it go away” if the man performed a sexual act on him.
The complainant told Ms Weiss he was “shocked and scared”.
“I had never been in trouble with the law. I had kept myself clean and tidy and had always kept my nose clean. I didn’t want to be in trouble or on the wrong side of the law,” the man told the review.
But when Ms Weiss searched police records for a copy of that complaint or report, she didn’t find anything.
Instead she came to the conclusion that it never existed, and that Reynolds had made it up in a bid to procure sexual favours.
Escaping detection
Despite the web of secrecy he created, Reynolds’ offending didn’t escape the attention of his colleagues.
In 2008, interstate police officers at the police academy bar overheard senior members of Tasmania Police call Reynolds a paedophile, and discussed two specific examples of alleged inappropriate conduct.
One of them related to Reynolds being seen giving a teenage boy a massage in his home, while the boy sat between his legs.
The interstate officers reported what they’d overheard to a Tasmania Police divisional inspector, who reported it to the commander of the internal investigations unit.
ABC News: Luke Bowden
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But both senior police officers said their conversation had been misinterpreted and they had not called Reynolds a paedophile.
The case was closed, with an assistant commissioner at the time noting the allegations could have “potentially very damaging consequences for a person wrongfully accused”.
It took another decade before Reynolds was again investigated by police, with that probe ceasing when he took his own life.
But it wasn’t until a coronial inquest was released in 2023 that Tasmanians learnt Reynolds was a sexual predator.
And that community members and his colleagues hadn’t known his true nature when they went to his funeral five years earlier.
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