“I forgive him. I don’t want him in my life. Me carrying around a hate towards him means I won’t let him go.”
These are the words of 28-year-old Chantelle. She is speaking about 66-year-old Michael Anthony Guider; the man who babysat her and her best friend in Sydney’s beach-side suburb of Manly when she was six-years-old. Who let the girls buy lollies from the corner store, and Coca-Cola, too. “I was never allowed to drink Coke,” Chantelle recalls. In the soft drink, Guider put the drug Normison, which knocked the girls unconscious. While they were passed out, he molested them and took photographs. They were with him for a weekend.
“He got us naked and touched us and got us to touch each other,” she told reporter Ross Coulthart in tonight’s episode of 60 Minutes. “I remember being really aware at one moment after not being aware for a long time. I was looking out of second story window thinking ‘I just want to get out’. I knew it was really really unsafe. I couldn’t leave.”
Why is Chantelle speaking out now? Later this month, Guider is eligible for parole. “I’ll do anything I can to keep him locked up,” she said.
Chantelle is convinced he will re-offend if released.
“With 100 per cent certainty, if [they] release Guider [they] are putting many little girl’s lives at risk.”
Chantelle and her mum went to the police and, in 1996, Guider was imprisoned on sixty charges of child sexual abuse. In his possession police found hundreds of photographs of children being sexually assaulted. There were at least nine girls and two boys.