DEFENCE STATEMENT

The Defendant, Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams, denies Counts 2, 3 and 4. As to Count 1, assault occasioning actual bodily harm, the Defendant admits deliberately striking Oliver Babington Wilson once with the telephone in his hand and causing the resulting injury. He has admitted that act from the outset and has pleaded guilty to the assault. He does not rely upon self-defence and does not contend that he was legally entitled to strike Mr Wilson.

The Defendant gave extensive accounts in police interview before receiving prosecution disclosure and, in his first interviews, without the benefit of legal advice. The factual case set out below is not an account formulated after inspection of the prosecution evidence. It is a fuller and more organised statement of the position the Defendant has maintained from the outset.

The Defendant does not suggest that every answer given during an unexpected police interview was an exhaustive account of several years of complicated events. Matters not then mentioned may require elaboration because the Defendant did not know what Mr Wilson or other witnesses had said, what factual propositions were being advanced against him, or which otherwise minor events would later become significant.

The Defendant knows of one factual error in his original account of the assault. Having listened shortly afterwards to his own contemporaneous recording, he realised that he had inaccurately recalled Mr Wilson as screaming in his face immediately before the blow. Mr Wilson was jeering at him, but the recording did not support that more specific recollection. The Defendant voluntarily corrected the police, explained that his memory had been mistaken rather than deliberately false, and supplied the recording itself, including the recording on which the assault can be heard.

The Defendant's approach remains the same. Where objective evidence shows that a peripheral recollection is wrong, he will correct it. Where an earlier answer was incomplete or expressed badly, he will clarify it. He does not, however, require sight of the prosecution evidence in order to decide what his underlying factual account is.

In particular, the Defendant has not yet been provided with Mr Wilson's complete VRI/ABE interview. Once it is served, the defence may need to identify and answer factual assertions which the Defendant could not previously have known were being made. Any such response will supplement this statement; it will not represent an invitation to reconstruct the Defendant's account in light of the prosecution evidence.

The Defendant and Mr Wilson had known one another for 5 years. Their relationship became romantic and intimate in approximately late 2023 and continued, in an unusually intermittent and unstable form, through 2024, 2025 and into 2026.

The Defendant does not contend that the relationship was conventional, continuously harmonious, or continuously described by both parties in identical language. It was markedly recurrent. There were periods of very close communication and intimacy; periods when Mr Wilson disappeared or communicated very little; arguments in which one or both parties said that the relationship was over; and subsequent resumptions of romantic and intimate relations.

Accordingly, the defence does not invite the Court to decide the case by attaching talismanic significance to whether either man used the word “boyfriend” on every particular date. The defence relies primarily upon concrete conduct and contemporaneous communications.

This recurrent pattern is important because statements by Mr Wilson that the relationship was “over”, or that he wanted no relationship, had repeatedly been followed by renewed romantic contact. One particularly clear instance occurred on 22 February 2026. Mr Wilson had submitted an application to the County Court directed towards formal separation. Shortly afterwards, he himself wrote to the Court cancelling all of the applications and stating: “Myself, Oliver Babington Wilson, and my partner, Samuel Robinson-Adams, have decided to cancel the application with our draft order ... and we will be seeking conventional relationship help.” The defence possesses this email in an authenticable, DKIM-signed form, as should the Central London County Court.

The relevance of this history is not that Mr Wilson was incapable thereafter of finally ending the relationship. He plainly was. It is that a declaration of rupture did not, within the history known to the Defendant, necessarily have the meaning that such a declaration might have in a conventional relationship in which separation had always been final.

The events immediately after 12 April 2026 are especially material. The prosecution chronology appears to treat the assault on 12 April as followed by an unequivocal termination of the relationship and thereafter unilateral unwanted pursuit by the Defendant. The contemporaneous record does not support such a simple sequence.

On 14 April, in a Facebook group conversation involving the Defendant, Mr Wilson and Damien McMullen, Mr Wilson wrote: “The solution is for us to resolve it between ourselves or to part ways. I suspect a competent professional will be useful.” That formulation itself treats “part ways” as one alternative to resolving the relationship, not as something already conclusively accomplished.

During the same post-assault period Mr Wilson expressly wrote “I love you Sam ❤”, “I love you so much 💖”, and “We’re boyfriends, aren’t we?”.

Mr McMullen was not a later stranger hearing the Defendant's account. He was a longstanding friend of the Defendant, knew Mr Wilson, was a participant in the April group conversations and witnessed the relationship contemporaneously. In a recorded conversation on 14 July he acknowledged that he had been in the relevant group chat and had seen it.

Mr McMullen's own contemporaneous communications also bear upon the Defendant's understanding after April. On 9 May he told the Defendant that he and Mr Wilson “clearly have a unique bond” and said he thought they would be able to work through matters. He subsequently told the Defendant that, if he gave matters a few days without emails or group chats, Mr Wilson would “soon enough speak with you”. When the Defendant asked whether Mr Wilson might leave him, Mr McMullen expressly replied that he had not said that.

The Defendant relies upon these communications not as proof that Mr McMullen could know Mr Wilson's private intentions with certainty, but as contemporaneous evidence of the interpersonal situation in which the Defendant was acting and of what a mutual friend familiar with both men was representing to him at the time.

The Defendant later discovered that Mr Wilson had, as the Defendant understands it, maintained a simultaneous intimate or romantic relationship with Samuel Cherny while maintaining the relationship described above with the Defendant. The Defendant's discovery of that position is central to understanding the second attendance at 16 Upper Mall.

Until shortly before 27 May the Defendant had understood Mr Cherny principally as one of Mr Wilson's housemates. The Defendant's eventual realisation that Mr Cherny was himself a romantic partner transformed his understanding of a considerable amount of Mr Wilson's previous behaviour, absences, secrecy about the household and refusal publicly to acknowledge aspects of his relationship with the Defendant.

The Defendant admits that on 12 April 2026, during an argument with Mr Wilson outside Stoke Newington Overground station, he deliberately struck Mr Wilson once with the telephone which he was holding.

The Defendant accepts that the blow caused a cut, bleeding and bruising to Mr Wilson's forehead. He accepts that he should not have struck Mr Wilson and does not rely upon self-defence.

The Defendant apologised to Mr Wilson immediately afterwards. He has never sought to deny the blow and indeed supplied police with contemporaneous recordings covering the incident and its aftermath.

The Defendant disputes inaccurate or exaggerated descriptions of the circumstances surrounding the blow where they arise, but those disputes do not constitute a denial of the assault itself.

As stated above, the Defendant initially misremembered one aspect of the immediate verbal exchange. After checking the contemporaneous recording he voluntarily corrected that error and supplied the evidence demonstrating it.

No legal defence to the admitted assault is advanced in this statement. Any issues of factual context or mitigation are separate from the Defendant's pleas to Counts 2–4.

The Defendant denies repeatedly or continuously engaging in controlling or coercive behaviour towards Mr Wilson as alleged.

The Defendant understands the charge to be particularised as:

1. tracking Mr Wilson's location;
2. tracking or recording his sleep schedule; and
3. making a chart intended to capture when Mr Wilson was and was not replying to the Defendant. The charge itself particularises those matters.

The Defendant does not deny the underlying existence of the information relied upon. His case is that the prosecution's description removes that information from its actual context and attributes to it a coercive purpose and effect which it did not have.

As to location, in January 2026 the Defendant asked Mr Wilson to share his location using Apple's location- sharing facility. Mr Wilson voluntarily shared it for a short period, understood by the Defendant to have been approximately a couple of days. The Defendant did not install spyware, secretly track Mr Wilson, obtain location data without his knowledge, or covertly compromise any device.

The request occurred during a period in which the relationship had resumed or was resuming after previous disappearances by Mr Wilson. The Defendant was anxious that Mr Wilson would again disappear without explanation. The contemporaneous messages include the Defendant openly asking Mr Wilson, “Why not share your location on Find My Friends?”

The Defendant accepts that his anxiety about Mr Wilson's whereabouts could be intense and that, viewed with hindsight, aspects of it could reasonably be regarded as over-involved. He denies that requesting and briefly receiving consensually shared location data constituted a course of coercive control.

As to the chart and sleep information, the Defendant accepts constructing a retrospective analysis using information available to him, including communications and continuous glucose-monitoring data which Mr Wilson had himself supplied.

Mr Wilson is diabetic. On occasions he gave explanations for disappearance or non-response which caused the Defendant genuine concern about his health, consciousness and ability to manage his insulin. In an 18 April communication to Mr McMullen, for example, the Defendant explained that Mr Wilson had represented himself as lapsing in and out of consciousness and insufficiently awake to take insulin, and that the Defendant had taken this seriously as a possible danger to Mr Wilson's life.

The chart was an attempt retrospectively to understand when Mr Wilson appeared to have been awake, when messages were sent or answered, what his glucose information showed, and how those matters fitted with explanations Mr Wilson had given for periods of disappearance or silence.

It was not a schedule imposed upon Mr Wilson. The Defendant did not thereby dictate when Mr Wilson could sleep, where he could go, when he must answer messages, or whom he could see.

The Defendant accepts that in interview he described aspects of this exercise in self-critical terms, including as “creepy”. He does not withdraw such moral or colloquial descriptions. An activity may be obsessive, ill- judged or embarrassing without thereby satisfying the statutory ingredients of controlling or coercive behaviour.

Similarly, where the Defendant has at times used the word “controlling” colloquially about his desire to know where Mr Wilson was or to prevent him disappearing, that is not intended as an admission that he engaged in the statutory offence. The factual conduct is admitted to the extent set out above; its characterisation as a criminal course of controlling or coercive behaviour is denied.

The Defendant denies that the conduct particularised in the charge had the alleged “serious effect” upon Mr Wilson. The Defendant further denies that, in the circumstances then known to him, he knew or ought to have known that the particularised behaviour would have such a serious effect.

The defence will rely upon the complete contemporaneous communications and data from which the prosecution's selected examples derive. Those materials are capable of showing the relational and welfare context in which the requests and retrospective analysis occurred.

The Defendant denies the offence charged under section 4A of the Protection from Harassment Act 1997.

The charge is particularised as a course of conduct consisting of “repeatedly attending the victim's home address” between 12 April and 11 June 2026.

The Defendant accepts attending 16 Upper Mall twice during the charged period: first on 18 April and secondly on 27 May. He does not seek to conceal, minimise or dispute those attendances.

He disputes, however, the prosecution's apparent characterisation of the two events as repeated manifestations of the same purpose: namely, a rejected former partner pursuing Mr Wilson after an unequivocal termination of their relationship.

The first attendance occurred six days after the admitted assault and after the post-assault communications described above in which Mr Wilson was continuing to discuss the relationship, saying that the parties could resolve matters or part ways, expressing love and expressly describing the men as boyfriends.

The Defendant attended in order to confront Mr Wilson about serious lies which the Defendant believed Mr Wilson had told him, including a prolonged false account concerning Mr Wilson's identity and supposed Albanian background, and to obtain an explanation from a person whom the Defendant still understood himself to be in an intimate relationship with.

The Defendant encountered Samuel Cherny at the gate. At that time the Defendant understood Mr Cherny to be Mr Wilson's housemate, not Mr Wilson's other romantic partner. The Defendant spoke to him about Mr Wilson's dishonesty. Mr Cherny filmed at least part of that encounter.

The Defendant does not presently recall first encountering Mr Wilson alone at the gate and disputes that detail only to the extent that it differs from his recollection. He accepts that the point is not central and that either recollection may be mistaken.

The Defendant did not go to the house on 18 April because he believed that an unequivocally terminated ex- partner had forbidden all future contact and he wished to pursue him notwithstanding that boundary.

Mr Wilson's formal written cease-and-desist/no-contact communication followed the first attendance later on 18 April. The Defendant accepts that, from that point, Mr Wilson had expressly communicated that he did not want direct contact.

The Defendant does not pretend that he regarded that communication with the same finality that an outside observer might have done. That was because of the recurrent history described above, including the very recent post-assault relationship communications and previous episodes in which statements of termination had been reversed. That explains the Defendant's state of mind; it is not advanced as a licence to ignore a boundary indefinitely.

The Defendant's expectation that the rupture might not be permanent was reinforced, rightly or wrongly, by Mr McMullen's communications on 9 May: that the Defendant and Mr Wilson had a “unique bond”; that they might “work through” the dispute; that after a few days without emails or group chats Mr Wilson would “soon enough” speak to him again.

The Defendant therefore disputes any suggestion that his understanding of continuing relational complexity after 12 April was fabricated retrospectively or existed solely in his own mind. The contemporaneous record demonstrates the basis upon which he understood the position, even if the Court ultimately concludes that he ought to have interpreted it differently.

By 27 May the factual situation had changed materially. The Defendant had by then concluded that Mr Wilson had maintained overlapping relationships with himself and Samuel Cherny and had substantially concealed each relationship from the other man.

The Defendant was shocked by that discovery. His purpose in attending the house on 27 May was principally to tell Mr Cherny what the Defendant believed he had discovered and give Mr Cherny information by which he could verify it.

This purpose was stated before the attendance, not invented after arrest.

At 09:47 on 27 May the Defendant emailed Mr Wilson, copying others including Mr Cherny's father, stating: “I am going to visit the two of you to discuss this.”

Later that day, before arriving, the Defendant asked Mr McMullen whether he would pass a message to Mr Cherny or establish whether Mr Cherny had seen material already sent via his sister, explaining that he wanted Mr Cherny to have an opportunity to think about it before the Defendant arrived. The Defendant expressly said that he was apprehensive Mr Cherny might believe that the Defendant had knowingly participated in Mr Wilson's infidelity, whereas the Defendant said he had not known of the Cherny relationship. He wrote that Mr Wilson needed to tell Mr Cherny the truth and, failing that, “I need to tell him the truth.”

At 17:52, again before the attendance, the Defendant wrote to Mr McMullen: “I love him anyway and I am going to give Cherny the truth.”

The Defendant had also prepared notes for the anticipated conversation. His intended opening was: “Did you know Oli was cheating on you? I didn’t.” The notes then contained dates on which the Defendant intended to say that he and Mr Wilson had been together.

The prosecution summary attributes to the Defendant the words “Did you know Oliver was cheating on me? I did not.” That is inaccurate. The Defendant's case is that he said “cheating on you”. He corrected that point to Mr Hussain on 19 June and identified his contemporaneous notes.

The distinction reflects the purpose of the attendance. The Defendant was not standing outside the house merely announcing his grievance that Mr Wilson had cheated on him. He was trying to tell Mr Cherny that Mr Wilson had been cheating on Mr Cherny with the Defendant, but that he (the Defendant) had not been a knowing party to that infidelity.

The Defendant deliberately intended to rely on checkable dates rather than an abstract argument about whether either man had used the word “relationship”. His purpose was to give Mr Cherny facts which could be compared against Mr Wilson's whereabouts and explanations on Mr Cherny's side.

The Defendant accepts that, once at the property, he rang the doorbell repeatedly, remained for a significant period and continued attempting to communicate after being asked to leave. He does not suggest that this was restrained or socially conventional behaviour. He was distressed, angry, determined to make the information reach Mr Cherny and unwilling at the time simply to leave the matter unresolved.

He accepts that the people inside the house may reasonably have found his persistence alarming. He disputes the additional narrative placed upon his purpose and conduct.

The Defendant did not enter the property and did not intend to do so. He did not attend with an intention to assault Mr Wilson, Mr Cherny or any member of the Cherny family.

The Defendant disputes the allegation that he jumped or climbed over the gate or deliberately attempted to defeat the gate latch. His account is that he stood up on tiptoe and put his lower arms on or over the top of the gate so that he could shout towards the house. The gate unexpectedly came unlatched under that pressure, causing him nearly to lose his footing. He did not proceed through it. He has specifically asked for the second camera footage because he says it will objectively show what occurred.

The prosecution papers themselves identify good-quality Ring footage and numerous clips and photographs supplied by Heather Cherny. The defence relies upon the complete footage as objective evidence of the attendance.

The Defendant did not speak to Mr Wilson during the 27 May attendance. His intended interlocutor was Samuel Cherny.

The Defendant recognises that prior correspondence during this extremely contentious period included aggressive, insulting and hyperbolic language. He does not ask the Court to treat every message he sent as measured or sensible. Any particular communication relied upon by the prosecution must, however, be considered in its full context and distinguished from the Defendant's actual purpose and conduct on 27 May.

The defence does not conceal earlier angry or hyperbolic references to Samuel Cherny. On 6 May 2026 the Defendant wrote, “I don't want to harm you. I do want to harm Mr Cherny – that would please me very much – but not Mr Riannon and not you”. At that stage the Defendant had not yet understood Mr Cherny to be Mr Wilson's other romantic partner. He was still operating substantially within the account of the household which Mr Wilson had supplied to him: a household involving criminality, coercion, exploitation and persons whom the Defendant believed might exercise improper control over Mr Wilson. The Defendant had also used deliberately absurd hostile rhetoric about Mr Cherny, including a mock-formal request to the landlord that Mr Cherny be “thrown into a volcano”. The Defendant does not suggest that the 6 May words were sensible or temperate. He denies that they expressed an intention physically to assault Mr Cherny. Their meaning must be assessed in that earlier factual and rhetorical context.

More importantly, the Defendant's understanding of Mr Cherny had materially changed by 27 May. By then he had concluded that Mr Cherny was not principally a malign housemate or controller of Mr Wilson but another person with whom Mr Wilson had maintained an overlapping romantic relationship and whom, like the Defendant, Mr Wilson had deceived. The Defendant therefore regarded Mr Cherny by 27 May substantially as another person entitled to know the truth. His contemporaneous communications before the attendance expressly record that changed purpose. He said that Mr Wilson needed to tell Mr Cherny the truth and, failing that, “I need to tell him the truth”; said “I love him anyway and I am going to give Cherny the truth”; asked Mr McMullen to pass information to Mr Cherny before the Defendant arrived; and told Mr Wilson in writing that morning, “I am going to visit the two of you to discuss this.”

Mr Wilson's own statement records receipt of that final email verbatim. He says that he did not reply because he received frequent emails from the Defendant and that he heard nothing further until the doorbell began ringing that evening. The Defendant relies upon this not to suggest that Mr Wilson consented to the visit, which he plainly did not, but because Mr Wilson's own contemporaneous account is consistent with the visit having been announced as a proposed discussion with “the two of you”, rather than announced as an act of violence or expressed in threatening terms.

The prosecution should therefore not collapse hostile language from an earlier period, when the Defendant believed a materially different account of Mr Cherny and the household, into proof of his purpose on 27 May. The defence case is capable of objective chronological testing: what the Defendant believed about the household at each stage, when he discovered the Cherny relationship, what he said before attending, what he prepared to say when there, what he actually said, and what he physically did are all evidenced by contemporaneous material.

The Defendant has, in informal communications immediately after his arrest, at times said words to the effect that he “technically” stalked Mr Wilson. He does not seek to hide that language. By it he meant that he had twice gone to the address and persisted in trying to communicate despite the second attendance being plainly unwanted. He did not thereby intend to admit the legal ingredients of stalking causing serious alarm or distress under section 4A. Indeed, in the same immediate post-arrest account he explained the two attendances as two different conversations occurring for different reasons.

The Defendant disputes that the two attendances, properly understood in their distinct factual contexts, constituted the charged course of stalking.

Further and separately, the Defendant requires the prosecution to prove that Mr Wilson suffered serious alarm or distress having a substantial adverse effect upon his usual day-to-day activities, as charged. The Defendant does not admit that result.

The Defendant accepts that by the second attendance he knew Mr Wilson did not want him to come to the house and knew that his arrival would be unwelcome and likely upsetting. He does not contend otherwise. He disputes that this admission establishes all of the ingredients of the much more serious offence charged.

If the Crown intends to rely upon communications, publications or conduct other than the repeated attendances as constituting part of the alleged course, notwithstanding the particularisation in the charge, the defence requests that the prosecution identify those matters precisely so that they can be answered individually.

The Defendant categorically denies sharing any photograph or film showing or appearing to show Mr Wilson in an intimate state with any member of the Cherny family during the period alleged in Count 4.

The Defendant understands the prosecution allegation to be that such material was received by Steven Cherny and that the allegation was later relayed to police through Heather Cherny.

The Defendant does not deny communicating with members of the Cherny family. He does not therefore advance the artificial defence that no communication whatsoever occurred.

In particular, the Defendant communicated with the Cherny family's then-15-or-16-year-old daughter, Lila Cherny. He sent material relating to his relationship with Mr Wilson and advised her to pass it to her brother and/or parents rather than listen to or inspect material containing adult subject matter herself.

Some of the material contained sexually graphic language used by Mr Wilson. The Defendant accepts that his warning to Lila was poorly worded and capable, particularly if relayed second-hand, of creating an impression that the attachments themselves were sexual images. It was not an admission that such images were sent, nor were they sent.

The Defendant subsequently supplied Steven Cherny with the underlying messages and attachments and explained that some contained violent sexual insults or graphic sexual language. He also says that he supplied police with access information so that the account could be checked.

None of the material sent by the Defendant to Lila Cherny was an intimate photograph or film of Mr Wilson.

The Defendant's case is that his material communications with Steven Cherny during the relevant period were by email. He denies sending the alleged intimate image to Mr Cherny by email, and denies sending anything at all to Mr Cherny during this period by Instagram or Facebook. (He later included Mr Cherny in some group conversations on Facebook.)

The Defendant accepts ownership or use of his genuine social-media accounts where applicable. He does not rely upon impersonation or unauthorised use of those accounts as his defence. His defence is simpler: the charged intimate photograph or film was not sent.

The alleged image and its alleged transmission are therefore central objective facts capable of straightforward proof or disproof. The defence seeks the original alleged image, the original message or transmission containing it, any screenshot or export showing that transmission, associated metadata, and the evidence of the alleged first-hand recipient.

If the allegation is based upon what Steven Cherny told Heather Cherny, who in turn told police, while Heather Cherny did not herself see the image, the defence does not admit that chain as proof of the charged transmission.

As no intimate photograph or film was shared, the Defendant also denies intentionally sharing such material for the purpose of causing Mr Wilson alarm, distress, or humiliation.

The Defendant does not seek to present himself as having communicated sparingly during the relevant period. He sent a great many messages and emails, created group conversations, and involved third parties in disputes which might ordinarily have remained private.

Many of those communications were emotional, repetitive, insulting, or extravagant. Some used dark humour or violent metaphor. The Defendant does not ask the Court to regard all of this as prudent behaviour.

His factual case, however, is that he was attempting to establish and communicate what he believed to be the truth about events in which Mr Wilson had repeatedly given incompatible accounts to different people. He did not regard himself as attempting to frighten Mr Wilson into submission or exercise domination over his life.

The defence will rely upon complete threads rather than selected isolated phrases. The nature of the relationship, the reciprocal communications, the repeated ruptures and resumptions, Mr Wilson's own representations, the Defendant's contemporary attempts to understand them, and the chronology of discovery of the Cherny relationship are all material to the proper interpretation of individual messages.

The Defendant does not suggest that sincerity automatically makes conduct lawful. His point is that purpose, knowledge, context, and effect are factual elements of the offences charged and cannot properly be inferred by removing particular words or acts from the relationship in which they occurred.

Mr McMullen is a potentially material witness because he had known the Defendant for approximately twelve years, knew Mr Wilson, observed parts of the relationship directly, and participated in relevant group conversations.

Before the criminal proceedings he had described the Defendant and Mr Wilson as “made for each other”. After 12 April he remained a participant in group conversations in which Mr Wilson expressed love and referred expressly to the Defendant as his boyfriend.

On 9 May Mr McMullen acted, in substance, as an intermediary or commentator upon Mr Wilson's position, telling the Defendant that the two men had a “unique bond”, that they could work through matters and that Mr Wilson would likely speak to him after a few days without group chats or emails.

Before the 27 May attendance, the Defendant communicated to Mr McMullen that he intended to tell Mr Cherny what he had discovered and asked Mr McMullen to help get the information to Mr Cherny before the Defendant arrived.

Mr McMullen subsequently communicated with Mr Wilson after the Defendant's arrest. The defence understands that part of the contemporaneous conversation is no longer present in Mr McMullen's records. The precise contents are not known to the Defendant, and the Defendant does not ask the Court to infer or invent those contents.

The materiality is narrower. Mr McMullen possessed direct knowledge capable of testing the simple proposition that the Defendant and Mr Wilson's relationship had unequivocally ended on 12 April and that all later conduct represented the unilateral pursuit of an ex-partner. Relevant communications between Mr McMullen and Mr Wilson, and any available deletion or recovery metadata, are therefore potentially important disclosure material.

The defence may rely upon Mr McMullen's later recorded statements and communications insofar as they bear upon his knowledge, recollection, and credibility. Those matters can be particularised separately if necessary.

The defence identifies the following evidential issues as arising directly from the positive case above. This section is not intended to substitute for a separate properly particularised disclosure request.

The complete Ring/doorbell and other CCTV footage of the 27 May attendance is material to the physical conduct alleged at the gate, the duration and character of the attendance, what was said, whether the Defendant attempted to gain entry, and the accuracy of the competing accounts.

Any second camera covering the rear or interior side of the gate is especially material to the allegation that the Defendant manipulated the latch and/or climbed or jumped over the gate, as opposed to the Defendant's account that it opened unexpectedly while he remained outside.

The complete body-worn video, 999 material and other police recordings relating to the relevant incidents are sought insofar as they bear upon contemporaneous accounts, demeanour and what witnesses reported before later discussion.

The complete audio recordings of the Defendant's interviews are material. The defence does not wish to rely upon paraphrased summaries where the original questions and answers are available.

Mr Wilson's complete VRI/ABE is essential prosecution evidence. The Defendant wishes to see the account actually given by Mr Wilson so that points of agreement and disagreement can be identified precisely. The Defendant does not require the VRI in order to decide his own account.

Relevant communications between Mr Wilson and Mr McMullen during the material periods are potentially capable of assisting the defence, particularly:

1. communications concerning the Defendant and Mr Wilson's relationship after 12 April;
2. communications surrounding Mr McMullen's representations to the Defendant on 9 May;
3. communications concerning the Defendant's stated purpose in attending on 27 May; and
4. communications on 27–28 May after the attendance and arrest.

If relevant messages were deleted, unsent, removed, or archived, the defence seeks any retained content and relevant metadata capable of showing when that occurred and whether recovery is possible. The defence presently makes no positive allegation as to the unknown contents of deleted communications.

In relation to Count 4, the alleged intimate photograph or film and the original transmission are obviously material. So too are any original electronic records, message exports, platform data, email headers, or attachments capable of establishing what was actually transmitted, by whom, to whom and by what medium.

Evidence from the alleged first-hand recipient is material. If Steven Cherny is alleged personally to have received and viewed the intimate image, his direct account and the original material available to him are of obvious importance.

Material said to establish the “serious effect” under Count 2 and the “substantial adverse effect” upon Mr Wilson's day-to-day activities under Count 3 should be identified so that the factual propositions can be admitted or disputed rather than left as conclusions.

For avoidance of doubt, the Defendant admits:

1. striking Mr Wilson once on 12 April with the telephone in his hand and causing injury;
2. having an intense, unstable and at times conflictual relationship with Mr Wilson;
3. asking Mr Wilson to share location data and receiving it voluntarily for a short period;
4. retrospectively analysing information including messages and glucose-monitoring information;
5. making a chart concerning periods of response/non-response and apparent wakefulness;
6. communicating extensively with and about Mr Wilson;
7. attending 16 Upper Mall on 18 April and 27 May;
8. knowing by 27 May that Mr Wilson had expressly said he did not want direct contact;
9. ringing repeatedly and persisting in attempting to communicate on 27 May notwithstanding requests to leave;
10. sending material concerning Mr Wilson to members of the Cherny family, including Lila Cherny;
11. asking Sam Cherny’s landlord to throw him into a volcano; and
12. occasionally using language that was astringent, hyperbolic, or ill-judged.

The Defendant denies:

1. that the admitted location-sharing and retrospective analysis constituted repeated or continuous controlling or coercive behaviour within Count 2;
2. that those acts had the serious effect alleged or that he knew or ought to have known they would have such effect;
3. that his relationship with Mr Wilson simply and unequivocally ended on 12 April;
4. that the 18 April attendance was pursuit of a person whom the Defendant understood or should reasonably have understood to have unequivocally terminated the relationship and wanted no further contact;
5. that the 18 April and 27 May attendances had the same purpose;
6. that his principal purpose on 27 May was to obtain access to or reconciliation with Mr Wilson;
7. that he entered, attempted forcibly to enter, jumped over or deliberately opened the gate;
8. that he attended on 27 May intending physical harm to any person;
9. that the prosecution can establish the statutory serious alarm/distress and substantial adverse effect required by Count 3;
10. sharing any intimate photograph or film of Mr Wilson with any member of the Cherny family; and
11. intentionally sharing such intimate material in order to cause Mr Wilson alarm, distress or humiliation.

No special legal defence is advanced to Count 1.

Counts 2, 3 and 4 are denied principally on the facts and upon the prosecution's ability to establish the statutory elements of each offence.

In relation to Count 4, if the Crown seeks to prove the alleged central transmission solely through an account relayed by a person who did not herself receive or see the alleged image, the defence may raise an admissibility/hearsay issue once the prosecution identifies the evidence upon which it intends to rely.

The defence reserves no licence to withhold a known positive factual case. The limitations in this statement arise from prosecution evidence which has not yet been served, most importantly Mr Wilson's VRI and the objective exhibits already referred to in the prosecution papers. If those materials reveal a new factual allegation which this statement could not reasonably anticipate, a supplementary statement may be required.