“Was physical contact between yourself and children common?” Glenister asked.
“Yes, they would come up for hugs and stuff. I was one of the most popular educators there,” Reti responded.
Asked if he ever exposed himself to one of the children, Reti laughed and said no.
“The CCTV of her in a red shirt, sitting on me that way, being a bit crazy and me trying to calm her down – that was the day that this all happened,” Reti said, referring to vision shown earlier in the trial.
“She’s sitting on me, doing all those crazy things, she said, ‘You have a willy’ and I said, ‘What?’ She’s looking down and said, ‘You have a willy and I can feel it’, and I said, ‘No thank you, you need to hop off now’.
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“That was the incident. You saw it all on the CCTV.”
But prosecutor Kathryn Kraus put it to Reti that he knew the location of “blind spots” for CCTV cameras in all the day rooms were, and questioned him on why he chose to work in childcare.
“Would you agree most of your jobs involve contact with children?” she asked, after pointing out to Reti that at the time of the offending he was working in multiple other casual jobs, as well as at the day care centres.
“In fact, what you wanted was exposure to as many children as possible,” Kraus put to Reti.
“Well, they were fun jobs,” Reti replied.
“You liked giving kids a cuddle?” Kraus asked.
“When they cuddled me,” he responded.
“I wouldn’t go out of my way to cuddle them.”
Reti said the children were always “hanging off him”, adding that it was “nice to feel loved and wanted”.
