A man accused of raping a German backpacker with his friends met the complainant at Family Bar on Auckland Central's Karangahape Rd. Photo / Jason Dorday
A young part-time model accused of having participated in the pack rape of a German backpacker in the early hours of New Year’s Day last year insisted to police that he didn’t remember having sex with her – or many other details of that morning.
It had been the 19-year-old’s first time drinking when he turned up at Family Bar on Auckland’s Karangahape Rd and met the woman, he explained when police arrested him four days after the incident.
“So then we went to nightclub ... But we did little dance, or something? I don’t remember too much. And I met a female,” said the defendant, referred to in public court documents only as “B” due to his ongoing name suppression.
“After dancing, we did some kissing, something. I really don’t remember that night. I just remember little bit of that night.”
He added, after a pause: “So I didn’t rape anybody. Really, I didn’t rape. Yeah, I remember I didn’t rape.”
Jurors began watching the two-hour recorded interview, in which B communicated through broken English but was aided at times by an interpreter, on Friday afternoon. It concluded this morning, as the second and likely final week of the High Court at Auckland trial began.
B is on trial beside friends O and S, who also have name suppression.
Prosecutors have alleged the trio made a joint plan to rape the 19-year-old complainant after she got into a van with the men outside the K Rd nightclub. She either explicitly didn’t consent to sex with the men or was too intoxicated to have given consent, the Crown said during last week’s opening address.
The woman, in her own recorded police interview three days before B’s arrest, sobbed as she recalled emerging from a blackout to find one of the men on top of her in the middle of intercourse.
B told police he had gone into Auckland’s City Centre around 6 or 7pm on New Year’s Eve and started drinking in a car park hours before arriving at the club. The woman had also started drinking hours earlier with friends from the backpacker’s lodge where they were staying.
When the two later met on the dancefloor, they did kiss consentually, prosecutors acknowledged. The woman said she had no memory of it but acknowledged CCTV footage showed her doing so.
B said security at the club had kicked them out because they were kissing and groping too much.
“So my friend brought the car to us, drove to where we were standing,” he recalled. “Then we did some kissing in the car. I cannot recall or remember where we were heading to.”
He later recalled dropping off the woman somewhere then going back to a car park where they had been drinking with friends prior to the nightclub.
“When I woke up, I was at home. I don’t remember,” he said, adding that it was about 2pm on New Year’s Day.
But CCTV tracked down by police showed the van with the three defendants and the woman driving 18 minutes away from the club to an empty carpark behind an industrial building in Avondale. Jurors watched the video several more times on Friday, including zoomed-in and enhanced versions.
Prosecutors allege the video shows all three men taking turns raping the woman, with B seen circling around the vehicle in partial states of undress before trading places with the driver so he could take a turn.
The woman was later dropped outside her backpacker’s lodge, with prosecutors suggesting she was pushed out of the vehicle in a final act of cruelty.
Gisella Perez, who was also staying at the hostel, recalled to jurors via an audio-video feed from Argentina how she saw the van stopped next to the kerb as she was returning from a work shift that morning.
“I saw a very young girl getting off abruptly,” she said through a Spanish interpreter. “She was wearing a tight black dress and she looked quite sweaty and her hair was messy.”
The witness recalled making eye contact with a man inside the vehicle.
“It was very intense, and I felt at that time danger,” she said. “I felt something’s not quite right.”
Prosecutor Fiona Culliney asked her to elaborate on what she meant by the woman leaving the van “abruptly”.
“What I saw wasn’t a friendly farewell,” she explained. “It was like someone trying to get rid of her, and like she wanted to come into the hostel really quick.”
The woman seemed intoxicated, unable to walk well, she recalled.
“On her face, you could see tiredness and stress and confusion maybe,” Perez said.
Fellow German backpackers Nellie Braunlich and Max Doerer recalled what happened next. Doer said the woman, at one point shortly after her return to the hostel, began hyperventilating and looking as if she was about to black out.
“She was shaking and she was screaming that she can’t do it anymore,” he said. “She tried getting up and running into the road, and she got into the first lane of the road ... She was trying to get run over by a car.”
Braunlich, who had accompanied the woman to Family Bar before the two lost each other in the crowd, returned to the hostel shortly after her friend.
“You don’t know what they did to me,” she recalled her friend saying repeatedly, distraught and not wanting to be touched.
In a conversation with a 111 operator a short time later, Braunlich explained what the complainant had told her: That multiple people had raped her in a car then pushed her out afterwards.
Dr Maya Steeper, a sexual assault forensic physician, examined the complainant later that day. She observed bruises on the woman’s neck and lip and skinned knees. The teen seemed traumatised, the doctor noted.
A gynaecological exam had to be cut short, the doctor said, because of the amount of swelling and pain the complainant was experiencing. Even for sexual assault exams, that’s “very uncommon”, she explained to jurors.
Swabs she took during the exam were later tested for DNA, tracing back to B and co-defendant O.
In the police interview, Detective Simon Reid showed B CCTV stills from inside the nightclub. B initially said he didn’t remember the woman’s face – just her black dress – but acknowledged the stills looked familiar.
“So this is my first time I drank,” he repeated. “This is my first time I went to nightclub. And this is my first time I met a girl in nightclub. So I with her. Only with one person. I’m not like I’m going around the club. Like, just saying I’m not like that.”
The detective asked bluntly if the two had sex.
“Have sex? Mm, I don’t think. I don’t remember,” he replied. “We had a kissing. Yeah, I just remember we did kissing, hugging ... I don’t think so.”
Detective Reid then asked B to explain his understanding of “consent”. The defendant requested to answer in his first language.
“To my understanding, when a girl approaches you, touches you, trying to kiss you, touches all of your body, and that means to me that is a sign of consent by her,” he said through the translator.
Turning back to English, he added: “If she wanted to stop me, I’m going to not touching her, really. I’m not going to kissing her and touching. But, I remember, she wanted to kiss me too much. And she wanted to touch me. And she wanted I touch her. I remember this. I don’t remember that she like, ‘Don’t do it.’”
When the detective indicated he was ready to finish the two-hour interview, the defendant returned to the question of consent.
“I would like to know what mistake – have I done it wrong, something wrong here?” he asked through the interpreter. “Because she wanted it the same time that I was.
“... I’m not that guy to rape someone.”
The trial continues before Justice Mathew Downs and the jury.
Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.
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