A woman allegedly sexually abused as a schoolgirl by former world snooker champion Graeme Dott has told a court she “struggled” to tell anybody about what happened.
Dott, 49, is accused of lewd, indecent and libidinous behaviour towards two primary school age children. The allegations span between 1993 and 1996 involving a girl, and 2006 to 2010 involving a boy, both in the Glasgow region. Dott has denied the two charges against him.
Trial evidence from alleged victim
His trial at the High Court in Glasgow has today continued hearing evidence from one of Dott’s alleged victims, who spoke from behind a screen. The woman, who is now in her 40s, told the court on Tuesday that Dott had sexually abused her on multiple separate occasions while she was a child.
She said the alleged abuse began when he was giving her a piggy back, and “started to caress (her) backside with his hands”.
She also told the court that “more than once” they had played a “guessing game” in which he had pulled her trousers down and lifted her top, and then touched her with different parts of his body. The object of the “game”, she said, had been for her to close her eyes and guess which part of his body he was touching her with.
Cross-examination by defence lawyer
Cross-examining the witness on Wednesday, Dott’s lawyer Euan Dow asked her about differences between her evidence in court and what she had told others in the years following the alleged offending – including the police.
He put it to her that one of the “more serious allegations” about Dott’s behaviour that she had described to the court on Tuesday was absent from a statement she gave police in 2001. She agreed there was no “specific reference” to it in the statement, but said: “I struggled to tell the police that part.”
Mr Dow also asked the woman what she had said to a relative about the alleged abuse, whom she had confided in before the allegations were reported to police. He put it to her that by the time she spoke to the relative she would have known what she alleges happened had been “wrong behaviour”, but she only told the relative about the piggy back and Dott touching her bottom.
“(She) asked you if anything else had happened and you replied ‘no’,” Mr Dow said. The woman replied: “I told her some things, but not everything. I struggled to talk about it.”
Mr Dow also put it to the witness that she had told one person she had spoken to about the alleged abuse that she was going to be “rich” as a result. The lawyer asked her: “Did you then say you could take this to the papers and make a lot of money?” The woman denied this.
Testimony from school friend
The court also heard evidence from one of the woman’s school friends, whom the court heard on Tuesday had been the first person she confided in. They had met at secondary school and the woman had been 15 when she told her friend about the alleged abuse.
The witness told the court the woman had come to her house one day and told her “Graeme had touched her”. She said: “I asked her where and was it in a wrong place, and she said yes.” Asked to describe what state the woman was in, the witness said: “She was really upset. She was crying uncontrollably. She was crying and crying, and I cried. I told her if she wanted to tell anybody I would help her.”
Dott won the 2006 Snooker World Championship and held a highest ranking of two in the world.
