A ‘depraved and selfish’ former councillor who filmed 28 women in bathrooms and bedrooms using hidden cameras over a period of almost 15 years has been jailed for six years and two months.
Bradford Crown Court heard emotional statements from many of the women targeted by Robert Holden, 51, describing how his ‘perverted fetish’ had left them feeling ‘violated, disgusted and mortified’ and, in many cases, had completely wrecked their lives.
Judge Sophie McKone described Holden’s actions as ‘voyeurism on a vast scale’, after she heard on Friday how an investigation uncovered hundreds of recordings of an intimate nature, including of women taking showers, engaged in sexual activity, on the toilet and getting undressed.
Some women had been recorded over lengthy periods – one for more than 12 years.
Going through each victim’s experience in turn, the judge said of one: ‘You recorded her in virtually every act she was doing, including sexual acts.’
One woman was recorded ‘on countless occasions’, sometimes with her very young daughter, and police later found that her mother had also been filmed by Holden, who was a Conservative and, later, independent member of Calderdale Council.
Another victim was just 16 at the time he filmed her showering.
Judge McKone said of this woman: ‘She felt violated, disgusted and mortified, and her main emotion is pure anger.’
The judge noted how Holden, who ran an IT business, kept huge numbers of these recordings on his devices, neatly labelled in files.
Judge McKone said Holden even turned to some of the women involved for comfort after he was arrested and attempted suicide, only for them to find out later that he had filmed them too.
She said: ‘This was voyeurism on a vast scale – not just in terms of the number of victims, or the length of time it went on for, but in terms of the number of times you watched a particular victim.’
Judge McKone said: ‘It’s hard to think of a worse breach of trust.’
The judge said that, in his own words, Holden did it ‘to get a cheap thrill’ but said he could not properly explain why he did what he did.
She said to him: ‘You are depraved and selfish,’ and added that he ‘hid behind a veil of respectability’.
Many of the women’s personal statements were read to the court on Friday and one faced Holden to read it herself.
One of the victims said the defendant ‘completely violated my privacy and my trust’, saying she now realises that he groomed her ‘for his own perverted fetishes’.
Another woman described how what happened had left her unable to trust anyone and she was now living as a virtual recluse.
Another explained how Holden’s actions had led to a series of problems in her life, including losing her children and her job, adding: ‘My life has fallen apart. I’ve lost everything.’
Holden was arrested in 2020 after a woman discovered a recording device in a bedroom in a property in West Yorkshire, but he fled the country to the West African island of Cape Verde, only returning after a lengthy extradition battle.
Jane Greenhalgh, defending, read a letter of apology to the court from her client which said ‘I abused that trust in the most abhorrent way imaginable’, and ‘I barely recognise the person that I have turned into’.
Ms Greenhalgh told the judge: ‘There’s no conceivable explanation I can advance for his behaviour.’
She said: ‘Through me, he expresses his remorse to all of the people who have been damaged by this case.’
The barrister said that Holden will now be remembered for these offences rather than the ‘infinite good deeds’ he performed as a councillor over many years.
She said his reputation is now ‘in tatters’ and that this was ‘punishment in itself for a man of his previous standing’.
Ms Greenhalgh said: ‘This is a tragic fall from grace.’
Holden, of Sowerby Bridge, West Yorkshire, admitted 31 counts of voyeurism and seven counts of computer misuse at a previous hearing, and a charge of failing to surrender to custody.
Holden ran an IT repair business and the computer misuse charges followed the discovery by police that he had abused the trust of his customers by copying information and images from devices left with him.
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