A police officer has gone on trial accused of raping a female colleague in Northland.
Photo: RNZ / Anneke Smith
The man, who cannot be named, faces one charge of indecent assault and one of sexual violation by unlawful sexual connection.
Judge Evangelos Thomas refused to grant continued name suppression this week but his identity remains a secret on appeal.
The 29-year-old is accused of raping a female officer in Kerikeri motel in the early hours of 5 February last year.
This morning prosecutor Fiona Culliney told the jury the pair were part of a large group of officers sent to Northland for Waitangi commemorations.
The night before Waitangi Day the group socialised and played drinking games at the motel, including skulling beer out of a hollowed-out police batton.
"The atmosphere was lively; it was jovial. People were laughing and joking, playing around, pushing and shoving each other, putting arms around each other and generally having fun and being a bit silly. Made all the more jolly, no doubt, by the beers they were consuming."
Culliney said at one point the complainant went to fetch another beer out of the defendant's motel unit when he beckoned her into a room and closed the door.
"To use what might be a colloquial term he tried to come on to her but he did a lot more than that. He put his hands down her short and rubbed her genital area on top of her underwear."
She told the court the woman blocked her face to prevent the man from kissing her and pushing his hands away from her groin.
"She said 'no, no, no, I'm married, you're married, stop this' and he says something like 'no-one has to know, come on' and she says 'well no-one has to know because nothing's happened'."
Culliney said the complainant left the room and the drinking continued until the early hours of the morning when the group headed to bed for the night.
The complainant sat in the courtyard with a senior police officer, drinking water and eating crackers, before going to bed herself and falling asleep quickly.
"Unbeknownst to her at 2.34am the defendant made his way quietly across the motel courtyard from his unit to her's. He slowly inched the ranch slider door open and left himself inside."
Culliney said the complainant was woken to a painful feeling in her privates and the man in her bed telling her to keep quiet with his arm over top of her to keep her in place.
The prosecutor said the woman sat up and asked the man what he was doing, swearing at him.
"His response to her made her feel as though she was being manipulated. He was saying 'I've got a wife and kids don't do this to me, what do you want me to do about it' having just raped her," Culliney said.
"Feeling helpless and still reeling from what he'd just done to her she felt her iPhone underneath her and managed to swipe the screen up. She scrolled across to the camera on her phone and began to video what was going on."
The Crown played this recording to the jury in court today.
In it, a man's muffled voice can be heard and the woman saying, "I denied you earlier and I've woken up to you ******* me".
Culliney said the defendant left the unit and told a friend he had been "hooking up" with the complainant and while having sex she had stopped him and started crying.
The prosecutor said the friend then went to the complainant's room and escalated the matter up to senior staff on site.
The contents of two Snapchat messages the defendant sent the complainant before entering her room were never read because the man removed her as a friend and deleted the application, the court heard.
Culliney said it was the Crown's case there was no way a sleeping woman could have consented to sexual activity.
"Put simply, he helped himself to the sleeping complainant. He took the risks given his own intoxication and sense of entitlement."
The man's defence lawyer, Paul Borich QC, said any sexual activity between his client and the complainant was consensual.
"This was a prearranged hook up. That is what the defendant told a police officer who he spoke to first about this matter... and that's it. It's as simple as that."
He asked the jury to focus on the pair's interactions during the socialising, filmed by CCTV cameras at the motel, and the fact there was at least two dozen police officers in the general area that night.
"There was probably more police per square foot than anywhere in Northland that night and on the Crown case the defendant goes to commit rape on his work colleague the next day and he's lucky enough to find that she's left the door open."
Borich said the woman's unit door had been left unlocked because the sexual encounter was prearranged.
"This was not rape, this was regret. This was regret by a complainant who was worried about the moral consequences of a bad choice to have a hook up.
"Consequences for her marriage, for her career and also for her reputation and the way out was to say rape."
The trial before Judge Evangelos Thomas and a jury of six women and six men is set down for two weeks.
"colleague" - Google News
March 04, 2020 at 11:06AM
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Police officer on trial accused of raping colleague - RNZ
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