‘VHS tape rapist’ whose wife found a cassette of him sexually abusing a young woman is jailed for five years – as the full, inside story of how his sick secret was exposed is revealed
- Boghos Parizian recorded video on VHS tape in the 1990s
- Ex-wife found the clip, titled ‘Big Mama’, in 2015
A man who filmed himself raping a woman has been jailed for at least five years after his ex-wife found the tape.
Boghos Parizian, 58, filmed an hour and 54 seconds of the assault on a VHS tape in the 1990s.
More than 15 years later, he insisted on getting into his estranged wife’s place, where locks had been changed after he was kicked out in 2009. She then found the tape, labelled ‘big mama’, among his belongings in the garage.
It was copied to a DVD and handed to police in 2015.
Boghos Parizian, 58, was convicted of 11 counts of sexual intercourse without consent in the NSW District Court
Detectives found the woman, who watched the footage in March 2016, the same month Parizian was charged.
Parizian’s barrister Chris Watson argued at trial the footage was confronting but the acts depicted were part of a consensual role-play.
The jury rejected that argument and found Parizian guilty on 11 counts of sexual intercourse without consent in February.
Judge Jane Culver said Parizian still denied the crimes and had shown no contrition or remorse, sentencing him in the NSW District Court on Friday to seven-and-a-half years in prison, with an non-parole period of five years.
The footage was the only way to truly understand the gravity of his offending and showed she was clearly not in a fit state to consent, the judge said.
‘She was obviously and apparently affected by something, that’s not to say it was the offender who spiked her drink to give rise to that appearance,’ the judge said after prosecutors withdrew a submission urging her to find Parizian had spiked her drink.
Sometime between October 1991 and March 1993, the woman had dinner with Parizian to tell him to leave her alone.
He had been calling incessantly after their brief relationship ended, while she was trying to reunite with her husband.
She began to feel ‘out of sorts’ and ‘not herself’ after drinking orange juice at dinner.
He drove her to his unit at Liverpool in Sydney’s southwest, saying his father was ill.
She remembers finding a mattress on the floor of his bedroom, angled differently to face towards the wardrobe, with the doors slightly ajar.
She does not remember what happened next, when Parizian repeatedly raped and threatened her throughout the hour-long assault.
‘You can’t stop me,’ he told her after she repeatedly protested and asked to leave, the court heard.
The victim was told ‘you can’t stop me,’ after she repeatedly protested and asked to leave, the court heard
‘I want everything my way today … don’t try to stop me from anything,’ the judge quoted, reading excerpts of the footage establishing Parizian knew she was not consenting.
Parizian later called the woman and threatened to show the video to other people but she did not believe the footage existed.
The woman said she attempted to take her own life after learning the footage did exist, telling Parizian he ‘destroyed my life as a young woman’.
In the footage, she sees the camera, and Parizian lies to her that it is broken and not filming, increasing his crime’s seriousness, the judge said.
Some in the public gallery left the court while Judge Culver detailed the graphic offending depicted in the footage.
Parizian is eligible for release on February 26, 2028.
