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11 months ago
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Former Perth Wildcats basketball star and convicted rapist Kendal 'Tiny' Pinder avoided being deported due to an astonishing decision by the Australian government despite a deplorable record of sexually assaulting women and girls.
Born in the Bahamas, the 67-year-old NBL championship winner's time with the club came to an end when he was found guilty of attempting to rape a 17-year-old schoolgirl in 1992.
That's just one in Pinder's long list of shocking attacks on women, with his convictions dating back to 1976, including prior guilty verdicts in Miami, Florida, and Perth, with offences in Australia spanning from 1988 to as recently as 2021.
Pinder (pictured during a Perth Wildcats game in the early 1990s) has been jailed multiple times in Australia due to his long list of attacks on women and girls
The Bahamas-born basketballer (pictured) used his sporting fame to lure his victims
He was given Australian citizenship in 1986, a year before he joined the Perth club. That was finally revoked in 2007, after he'd spent time in jail for his sickening offences.
Pinder now has an ex-citizen visa that means he can stay in the country indefinitely.
In 2009, the Department of Immigration and Citizenship told Pinder his visa could be cancelled - then backtracked a few months later, the ABC reported.
When his visa was cancelled in 2017, he challenged the move in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal - and won.
In his decision handed down in 2019, tribunal deputy president Stephen Boyle found that Pinder did not pass the character test, but said the risk of him posing further harm in Australia was 'not an unacceptable one'.
Now aged 67, Pinder fought a 2017 decision to cancel his visa - and won after the Administrative Appeals Tribunal found the risk he posed was 'not an unacceptable one'
His reasoning was that Pinder had used his fame as an athlete to lure his victims, but since his sporting career had long been over by that time, 'the opportunity for such offending is significantly less now'.
When contacted by the ABC, a spokesperson for the Department of Home Affairs said the body does not comment on individual cases.
By 2019 Pinder's criminal record in Australia was long and extremely serious.
The convicted rapist helped the Perth Wildcats win the 1991 NBL championship (pictured) before he was found guilty of trying to rape a 17-year-old the following year
After the conviction that ended his time with the Wildcats in 1992, he was found guilty of sexually assaulting a 20-year-old woman and a 16-year-old girl.
After being paroled in 1995 he was jailed again for a sexual assault on a 15-year-old in Wollongong, NSW, where he played for the Illawarra Hawks NBL side.
A 51-year-old woman has recently come forward to accuse Pinder of raping her in Perth when she was 15.
In 2021 he pleaded guilty to stalking a woman in Sydney after ordering her to get into his car outside a train station and was jailed for 15 months.
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