Alan Jones welcomed prominent athlete to luxury home with ‘hug and slap on the bottom’, former butler tells court

The man who was Alan Jones’s butler for almost two decades has told a Sydney court his boss would welcome a prominent athlete to his luxury harbourside apartment with “a hug and a slap on the bottom” and would call him “champion”.

The butler, David Allan, testified in the Downing Centre court that he worked at “the coalface” of the broadcaster’s domestic life as a household manager for 18 and a half years up until August 2019. He cooked, cleaned and ironed everything including his underpants and socks, while his employer “tried to exist on 2.5 hours [sleep] a day”.

“I polished the shoes and cleaned the loos and everything else you do in a house,” Allan, 79, said.

The trial has heard from the prominent athlete, an alleged victim known as complainant M, who told the court Jones would welcome him with a hug and a kiss on the cheek and use flattering terms like “champion” and “beautiful man”.

Complainant M’s case involves two of the 21 charges of indecent assault and sexual touching against Jones.

The trial is in its eighth week and Jones, 85, has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Allan, who said he remembers the prominent athlete visiting on eight or nine occasions, was asked by prosecutor Georgina Wright: “How would the defendant greet [M] when he arrived in the apartment?”

Allan: “Well, it was always the same as all sports people seem to do today. It’s a hug and a slap on the bottom … [and he would say] Hello, champion. And [they would] sit down and chat away.”

After he was asked if he said “slap on the bottom” he said: “Probably the wrong thing to say today, isn’t it?”

Allan said he referred to his employer as Sir or Mr Jones while others called him AJ or Alan. He never sat down to eat with him but was always close by serving food or working in the kitchen.

He said “many, many athletes” visited the apartment. “I saw we had cricketers, we had swimmers … we had endless people in the sporting environment”.

Allan agreed he saw Jones with a young male athlete at the apartment between 2003 and 2005, and a total of half a dozen young athletes were visitors.

Allan recalled his interview with Jones for the position of butler.

“I can remember his words to me were, ‘Can you knock up a few sandwiches?’ And I said, ‘Crust on or crust off?’ And that was that.”

“Mr Jones had a very hard, extraordinarily brutal regime of work hours.”

“When he realised I could boil an egg, he would bring guests, we’d have guests for lunch. And then that extended into dinnertime, and we’d do dinners, and then we’d do Sunday roasts and the weekend and then Saturday breakfast when he was off air.”

Under cross-examination by defence barrister Claire O’Neill, Allan was asked if he witnessed “any behaviour by Mr Jones towards a male athlete that was inappropriate” between 2003 and 2006.