A controversial ex-politician allegedly choked his girlfriend until she passed out, threatened to kill her and said he would put a bullet in her mother’s head.
Salim Mehajer appeared in NSW District Court on Tuesday after being charged with seven counts of domestic violence.
The 36-year-old has pleaded not guilty to the charges, which include four counts of common assault, intentionally asphyxiating a person without consent and assault resulting in actual bodily harm.
The controversial former deputy mayor of Auburn was charged with the crimes two days before Christmas Day in 2020.
He wore prison green over a white T-shirt with his hair combed back as he prepared to represent himself at the three-week trial.
Former politician Salim Mehajer (pictured) allegedly choked his girlfriend until she passed out, threatened to kill her and said he would put a bullet in her mother’s head, a court heard
In his opening statement, Crown Prosecutor Ken Gilson told the jury they would hear that Mehajer had been “charming and kind” when he first met the victim in 2017.
The prosecution alleges that during their three-year relationship, he had “attacks or episodes of anger” in which he threatened to harm his girlfriend, her family or himself.
The victim went to the police in December 2020, claiming she had been assaulted four times in the past two years.
The jury was told that during one of the alleged assaults, Mehajer hit his girlfriend 10 times on the head after he told her not to wear any jewelry.
The court heard that his girlfriend was lying on a bed in his home in Lidcombe that same month, looking at her phone when he accused her of letting people into his home to steal his belongings.
The jury was told that Mehajer knelt on top of his partner and gripped her hand so hard that the phone screen cracked, cutting her hand. Then he would have searched her phone.
Mehajer, 36, has pleaded not guilty to the charges, which include four counts of common assault, intentionally asphyxiating a person without consent and assault resulting in actual bodily harm
An argument over an ex-boyfriend turned violent, the court heard, when Mehajer accused his girlfriend of searching for her ex-boyfriend on Instagram and trying to meet him.
But Mr Gilson told the jury the ex-boyfriend would testify that Mehajer was the one who had followed him on Instagram and ‘challenged him to meet up’.
The court heard that Mehajer became enraged and dragged his girlfriend from the living room to the washroom, where he pressed her against the wall.
He allegedly intimidated her by telling her he would hurt her, and threatened to kill her mother by “putting a bullet in her head.”
“Listen, you little bastard, if you ever go to the police, I’ll get you and I’ll get your mother,” the court heard him say to her.
The former councilor allegedly told his girlfriend that he would ask someone else to follow through on his threats if he went to jail.
The controversial former deputy mayor of Auburn (pictured) was charged with the crimes two days before Christmas Day in 2020
He is said to have inflicted “a dead arm” on the woman in October 2020 when he threw something at her during an argument over water bottles in the fridge.
Mr Gilson said Mehajer then committed ‘the most serious of crimes’ by deliberately asphyxiating the woman until she lost consciousness.
He yelled at his girlfriend and “called her useless” as he followed her to the bathroom, the court heard.
The jury was told she started screaming and Mehajer held his hand over her mouth and nose until she passed out.
Gilson said the woman woke up to find herself on the floor and her boyfriend banging his head against the toilet bowl.
“He put his hands on my mouth and nose and kept threatening to beat me to death and I couldn’t breathe,” she wrote in a text message to a friend.
Mr Gilson told the jury he expected Mehajer to say the relationship was ‘harmonic’ until it ended over alleged infidelity.
“Other reasons could be put forward in the process, in fact I am sure there will be,” Mr Gilson said.
The former deputy mayor of Auburn “firmly” denied the allegations during an interview with police, declaring the woman “an unreliable witness,” the jury was told.
Mehajer will present his opening statement before Judge James Bennett on Wednesday.