The man used his job as a tour operator to meet his teenage victim. 9News
In November 2017, Luke Brandon Sturt Bartlett ran Rainforest Spirit Tours, a Cairns-based adventure travel company. Through that job, he met two Swedish teenagers - one of whom he raped and sexually assaulted.
After a tour one night, the 38-year-old invited the 19-year-olds - who can't be named for legal reasons - to his Cairns home for a barbeque, where he spent the evening talking about 9/11 conspiracy theories and told the pair he could give them massages which could "destroy" them. The next night, one of the girls allowed him to massage her and she fell asleep. She later awoke to find Bartlett performing a sexual act on her. The young woman pushed him away, but he continued to touch her, believing, he said, that she "wanted it".
Earlier this year, a Cairns District Court jury found the 38-year-old guilty of rape and sexual assault but cleared him of similar charges against the second woman. In sentencing today, a judge took into account Bartlett's barrister’s submission - which blamed Aspergers and ADHD for an inability to read social cues and his obsession with massages.
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