A woman says she tried to get an abusive partner out of her life, but he would "force his way back in". Photo / 123rf
Warning: This story deals with sexual and domestic violence, and may be distressing.
When a 52-year-old woman who’d been struggling to end a relationship with a man told him to stop as they were having sex, he refused.
She said the sex had begun to hurt and he was “getting rough” with her.
The woman told him to stop, but he said, “I haven’t finished yet.”
According to the Crown summary of facts, he then hit her several times with a closed fist on her face and head, kicked her, and then put his hands around her throat and “pinned her down”.
She felt like vomiting, and as he was strangling her, he told her, “I’ll f***en kill ya.”
The woman waited for him to go to sleep, then left and reported the matter to the police.
The pair had been in a relationship, but the woman had been trying to end things when the man spotted her at the Greerton Shopping Centre in Tauranga, in early 2024.
He told her to come with him, or he would “smash her face into a tree”, and also threatened to kill her mother.
At the time, he was on bail for charges that included assault on a person in a family relationship, in which the woman was the complainant.
The pair went back to his house, and together they consumed alcohol. In the early hours of the following morning, the man asked to have sex with her, and she initially agreed.
However, she then said no when it became painful, and he refused to stop.
The 52-year-old man, who cannot be named, pleaded guilty to charges of threatening to do grievous bodily harm, two charges of threatening to kill, rape, and injuring with intent to injure.
In a victim impact statement, read in court by Crown prosecutor Daniel Coulson, the woman said it was “hard to put into words how stressful this has been, not only for me, but for my mother as well”.
She spoke of the mental and physical toll of the rape and beating, which had left her with bruises that were visible for “weeks”.
“[He] was relentless, would never listen to the word ‘no’,” she said.
“Even when I tried multiple times to get him out of my life, he would force his way back in.”
She had nightmares and difficulty sleeping, and had been left having to “watch her back”.
“This traumatic incident has now been spread around the community with people talking to me ... raising concern with me that I needed to watch my back and that there’s a lot of people looking for me,” she said.
The man’s family had “believed his lies”, and for the past 18 months she had been “concerned about what people would do”.
She said all she wanted was to have him “out of my life for good, and I don’t want to see him again”.
The man sought a sentence indication, and Judge William Lawson indicated a starting point of seven-and-a-half years’ imprisonment, with a two-month uplift for offending while on bail, and a further one-month uplift for previous offending.
The man was sentenced by Judge Thomas Ingram in the Tauranga District Court this week.
Judge Ingram applied a 20% discount for the man’s guilty plea and a 15% discount for his difficult background.
There was a discussion between Judge Ingram and the man’s lawyer, Gerald McArthur, about the background issues and whether more information was needed by way of a formal cultural report – funding for which had been declined by legal aid.
McArthur also told the judge his client was genuine in his remorse, despite a pre-sentence report suggesting otherwise.
“He states to me that his behaviour on that night was fuelled by alcohol abuse, and the deterioration of his mental functioning due to years of alcohol abuse,” McArthur said.
While the victim had said the man continued to breach bail to see her, McArthur said his client claims “she continually came around to see him”, and the pair would drink heavily together, as both had issues with alcohol.
“Having said that, there’s nothing in that which forgives him for his conduct to her in this unpleasant way, and he accepts that,” McArthur said.
Judge Ingram was satisfied he had enough background material before him, and that a 15% credit was appropriate to recognise the difficulties of the man’s life, which the judge accepted had directly contributed to the offending.
However, he would not apply any further discounts for remorse, rehabilitative efforts, offers to do restorative justice, or time spent on electronically monitored bail.
“I do, however, consider that the generosity of my assessment of your background matters has really encompassed any credit that you might have had for those matters,” Judge Ingram said.
He determined that a five-year prison sentence was appropriate.
The judge said he wanted to “record my view that the sentence indication given by my colleague is a pretty generous sentence indication in all the circumstances and I personally would have been unlikely to have given a sentence indication as low as that”.
However, Judge Ingram said, the man was entitled to “the benefit of all the work that you have done and the matters that have been addressed in detail by counsel, and the material that has come before me”.
He encouraged the man to take up courses while in prison, to prepare himself for the prospect of parole as, given the man’s age, “time spent in prison is time lost”.
“You need to be doing something worthwhile whilst you are in prison,” Judge Ingram said.
On the rape charge, the man was convicted and sentenced to imprisonment for five years; on the remaining charges, he was sentenced to one year’s imprisonment to be served concurrently.
Hannah Bartlett is a Tauranga-based Open Justice reporter at NZME. She previously covered court and local government for the Nelson Mail, and before that was a radio reporter at Newstalk ZB.