Former Media Personality Alan Jones Faces Indecent Assault and Sexual Touching Charges

Alan Jones enjoyed his position at the top of media, political and sporting circles for the better part of four decades.

The former English master rose to be a successful Wallabies coach, a prime ministerial speech writer and a top-rating shock jock who was both courted and feared by the political establishment.

So demanding was Jones that the former prime minister John Howard was said to have appointed a dedicated go-between known as the minister for Alan Jones. People on both sides of politics believed Jones’s breakfast radio show could influence elections.

But on Monday the 85-year-old will be sitting in the dock in a New South Wales local court room as a criminal defendant.

The former 2UE and 2GB broadcaster is facing 22 charges of indecent assault and sexual touching involving six men in both professional and social settings. The locations detailed by police charge sheets include Jones’s luxury apartment on Macquarie Street overlooking Sydney harbour, his Fitzroy Falls property in the Southern Highlands and several Sydney venues.

The youngest complainant was 17 at the time of the alleged offending. As alleged victims of sexual assault, all the complainants in the trial will be anonymised and will give evidence in camera via closed circuit television.

The Crown case involves multiple incidents of alleged assault with an act of indecency and sexually touching another person without consent between 2003 and 2020, according to the charge sheet.

The four-month trial in Downing Centre court in central Sydney will hear from 76 witnesses and is expected to attract intense media interest.

Jones has pleaded not guilty to all charges, and after his first court appearance in December 2024 he said: “I have never indecently assaulted these people. The law assumes I am not guilty, and I am not guilty. I am emphatic that I’ll be defending every charge.”

The prosecution will argue Jones has a “sexual interest in men particularly younger than himself” and a “tendency to act upon that interest”, the court heard in pre-trial hearings last month. The allegations range from Jones touching the alleged victims on the buttock, penis and/or thigh and/or kissing them.

The judge, Glenn Walsh, will allow the prosecution to rely on tendency and coincidence evidence, including allegations that in separate incidents Jones touched the genitals of two different complainants while they were driving him, and kissed four complainants on the mouth or lips. In the pre-trial hearing, Walsh said the complainants were unknown to each other.

The defence barrister, Gabrielle Bashir SC, said this week Jones was “anxious to have his day in court”. No application has been made for Jones not to attend court in person each day.

Controversy and lawsuits

When Jones was arrested by New South Wales police after a “long, thorough, protracted” investigation at his city apartment in late 2024, he had been retired from his $4m-a-year breakfast radio show on 2GB for four years.

Police say they formed Strike Force Bonnefin after reporting in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age resulted in alleged victims coming forward.

Jones’s long radio career came to an abrupt end in 2020 after a series of on-air incidents led to the radio station losing advertisers and haemorrhaging revenue.

He had recorded an unequalled 226 survey wins, but 2GB’s then owner, Nine Radio, was losing revenue from advertisers boycotting his show.

Jones’s career is littered with controversy and lawsuits, including the 1999 cash for comment inquiry, a ruling by the New South Wales Administrative Decisions Tribunal that he incited hatred against Lebanese people in 2005, and misogynist verbal attacks on Julia Gillard and Jacinda Ardern. He was sued successfully for defamation on multiple occasions, including one case brought by the Toowoomba-based Wagner family that resulted in a $3.4m payout.

The journalist Chris Masters analysed Jones’s power in his 2006 book Jonestown, saying he had “all manner of princes and premiers bowing before him” in the days when advertisers were flocking to have slots on his show.

“I think that they thought that there was no upside in opposing him,” Masters said after Jones’s arrest. “If you fought him, then you weren’t winning before his audience. His audience was so loyal, he had a kind of evangelical following.”

But Jones’s star began to wane when his incendiary style began to affect his employers’ revenue, largely due to consumer boycotts of advertisers.

Jones was dropped by Sky News Australia and the Daily Telegraph in 2021 after his Covid-19 commentary, which included calling the NSW chief health officer, Kerry Chant, a village idiot on his Sky News program.

On Facebook Jones said: “The company has felt under threat from being cancelled.”

On his final 2GB show in 2020, all manner of high-profile guests lined up to congratulate him, including the One Nation leader, Pauline Hanson. The former prime minister Tony Abbott and NSW MP Mark Latham turned up to his farm to watch him record his last show. Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe sent their regards.

“We don’t always agree with our politics,” Crowe said, “but the thing that I know about you, Mr Jones, is the size of your heart.”