Court

Defence: Doctor Was 'Arrogant'
Thur 15th Nov 2012, Yellow Advertiser

DEFENCE barrister Patrick Gibbs told jurors the only thing Dr Anton Van Dellen was guilty of was arrogance.

Mr Gibbs said Dr Van Dellen was highly intelligent and believed he could keep control of any situation.

Jurors heard that as a teenager Van Dellen had studied medicine for two years in Los Angeles.

He qualified as a doctor in South Africa in 1994.

After travelling to the UK in 1997, he gained a PHD in brain science at Oxford University.

In 2007 he attended Cambridge University, where he obtained a law degree.

Mr Gibbs said Dr Van Dellen believed that despite the boy’s repeated sexual advances online, he could keep control when they met.

He said: “If you are highly intelligent in most ways, you may be arrogant enough to convince yourself that you are going to be able to control the situation.”

Testifying in his own defence, Dr Van Dellen told jurors he had been laying on his sofa watching television when the boy began a Facebook conversation with him.

He said he had had an argument with his new partner, who had pulled out of a garden party at the ‘last minute’ the previous day.

He said he had been attracted to the boy, who he thought was 18 or 19.

The pair flirted and began arranging to meet, but Dr Van Dellen called it off when the boy admitted his age.

A transcript of the pair’s Facebook chat showed that Dr Van Dellen had later agreed to meet but had consistently told the boy they could not do anything sexual.

Asked on the stand why he had changed his mind and agreed to meet, Dr Van Dellen said: “It was clearly a terrible decision of mine. It’s not the worst decision I’ve ever made, but it ranks up there with some of the worst decisions I’ve ever made.

“I thought, very wrongly as it turned out, that I was making it clear that I could control the situation.”

Dr Van Dellen, who lived with his parents but had never told them he was gay, admitted to jurors that he had been ‘excited’ by the idea of continuing his flirtatious conversation with the boy in person.

Mr Gibbs acknowledge that the response would be controversial but said jurors would have to deal with ‘the tricky question between what is unattractive and what is a crime’.

He said: “He has undoubtedly been reckless in the extreme on his own account. None of that means that he has committed a criminal offence. You might say, ‘Well, it ought to be’. But it isn’t.”

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