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• Stephen Elliot was jailed for assaulting a couple in a Salvation Army store. His sentence was later changed to home detention.
• He later abused them on TikTok and has now been sentenced to community detention and community service for making that post.
• Judge Bridget Mackintosh condemned Elliot’s TikTok post, saying it was abusive, serious and hurtful.

A man jailed for assaulting a couple in a Salvation Army second-hand store went on TikTok later calling them ugly and racist and leaving them fearful for their safety.

When spoken to by police about his social media post, Elliot told him there was no law against what he was doing.

“I guess now you’ve learnt that there is,” Judge Bridget Mackintosh told Elliot when he appeared before her in the Hastings District Court on two charges of causing harm by posting digital communications.

The contents of the TikTok post were not discussed in detail when Elliot was sentenced to community detention and community work on Monday. However, a judge-alone trial was told in March that Elliot called the husband a “middle-aged racist coloniser from Britain” in the obscenity-laden video, which has since been removed.

Elliot also called both the man and his wife “ugly” and alleged they made racial slurs against him during a physical altercation in Napier in 2021 which was the subject of an earlier trial.

The couple have denied this and have said they feared for their safety after the TikTok post, with commenters on the social media platform demanding they be named so others could “finish the job off”.

Other people on TikTok said Elliot “should have stomped on him” or “kicked his f***ing head in”.

Judge: Post was not ‘colourful’ but abusive

In court on Monday, Elliot’s lawyer, Ben Frendin, said the post had contained “too colourful language”.

“Colourful is a polite description. It’s not colourful. It’s abusive,” Judge Mackintosh said.

She sentenced Elliot to six months of community detention with a 9am to 5am curfew, and 250 hours of community service.

Elliot and the British-born couple first crossed paths in the Salvation Army shop in Taradale in January 2021.

The two men came to blows after the husband objected to something Elliot was saying to a staff member about Covid-19.

Elliot said that his brother in France had caught the disease and it was no worse than a cold or the flu. The husband objected to this because his mother-in-law was dying with Covid in an English hospital.

During a three-day jury trial for the assault charges, the man admitted he threw the first punch in the dispute, but only after he had been backed up against a display cabinet and Elliot had pushed his wife.

The court was told that Elliot, in his early 40s, was 140kg and had been training in martial arts since the age of 10. The husband was nearly 60 years old, 175cm tall and 80kg.

Encounter in store ‘a hopeless mismatch’

Immediately after the incident, Elliot recorded a four-minute social media video in which he admitted knocking the husband unconscious. The trial was told the encounter was a “hopeless mismatch”.

Elliot was found guilty of assault with intent to injure the man and a charge of assaulting a female when he pushed the woman.

He was remanded in custody and later jailed for 15 months, although this sentence was changed to home detention early last year.

He posted the TikTok in March 2023 - an action that Judge Mackintosh said was “serious ... hurtful and caused stress and harm to the victims”.

Elliot also mocked the woman’s mother, who had died.

Judge Mackintosh said the woman had been worried about her professional reputation following the incident and had been engaged in counselling.

Ric Stevens spent many years working for the former New Zealand Press Association news agency, including as a political reporter at Parliament, before holding senior positions at various daily newspapers. He joined ��һ�ǿ�����’s Open Justice team in 2022 and is based in Hawke’s Bay. His writing in the crime and justice sphere is informed by four years of front-line experience as a probation officer.