A Brisbane court has heard that former Harvest Rain Theatre Company CEO Timothy O’Connor allegedly sexually abused a boy in his family home.
ABC reports O’Connor faced a two-day committal hearing in the Brisbane Magistrates Court yesterday, on nearly 60 fraud, child and adult sexual offences. Alleged victims gave evidence in a portion of the hearing. The first charge was brought in 2022.
Police allege he used his position of power, as Harvest Rain’s CEO, to abuse boys and men over a ten-year period.
Harvest Rain shot to prominence in the 2010s with large-scale theatre productions which included ‘Cats’, ‘Spamalot’, ‘Footloose’, ‘Pirates Of Penzance’, ‘Hairspray’ and ‘Grease’.
In a 2014 interview with scenestr for ‘Cats’, the company’s choreographer had been working with a cast of more than 800 people to perfect the performance, which has proved to be the largest rendition of 'Cats' ever to be performed in the Southern Hemisphere. “It's going to be a spectacle", he said.
Harvest Rain rebranded as AVT Live and closed in 2022 shortly after O'Connor's arrest.
In 2011, O'Connor won a Groundling Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Queensland Theatre Industry. In 2012, he was nominated for Brisbane's Person Of The Year.
In 2014, he won a Gold Matilda Award for his work with Harvest Rain and was also nominated for Best Director for ‘Spamalot’.
On the committal hearing’s first day in Brisbane, theatre performer Naomi Price gave evidence.
According to ABC, Price stated a number of young, male artists made disclosures to her about inappropriate behaviour between 2008-2011. When Price was asked by defence counsel , Ruth O’Gorman, why she had not spoken to authorities about these disclosures, she said, “because he was her friend and boss; it was a complicated dynamic".
O’Gorman challenged evidence from one child at the centre of 26 of the 59 charges arguing it was “weak, vague [and] tenuous”. She also put that these alleged offences occurred “many, many years ago” and that the complainant’s distressing condition “could have had a possible impact on his evidence”.
The court heard police received complaints against Mr O'Connor as early as 2017 but Operation Uniform Cartograph was only established after another complainant came forward in mid-2022.
Magistrate Lewis Shillito will hand down his committal decision at a later date.
