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Report into disgraced cop Paul Reynolds highlights how he was able to groom dozens of young boys for decades

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  • Report into disgraced cop Paul Reynolds highlights how he was able to groom dozens of young boys for decades
  • 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.

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