It was the early hours of New Year's Day 2025 when the men allegedly led a German backpacker away from revellers and into a van. Photo / 123rf
Warning: This story deals with allegations of sexual assault and may be upsetting.
In the first hours of New Year’s Day 2025, three young men led a highly intoxicated German backpacker away from revellers on Auckland’s busy Karangahape Rd and into a van.
They then allegedly drove her 18 minutes away to the back of an industrial building in Avondale.
The “devastating ordeal” that followed, caught in part on CCTV, was an orchestrated pack rape of the 19-year-old tourist, prosecutors said today as the trio’s trial began in the High Court at Auckland.
In a final act of indignity, the teen was then driven back to the city centre and left in the street – on her knees, crying and asking for help – in front of her hostel, jurors were told today.
The defendants, who have all been granted name suppression until the completion of the trial, were 19 and 20 years old at the time.
Each has been charged with three counts of rape – one count each for the act itself and two counts of aiding or encouraging each other as they allegedly took turns.
“These men acted together. They had a plan,” Crown prosecutor Fiona Culliney said.
“Simply put, they did what they wanted to her that night and then they pushed her out of the van once they were done with her.”
In brief opening remarks, lawyers for two of the men – referred to in court documents as B and O – said their clients were not guilty because they had a reasonable belief that the sex was consensual.
“The defence position was that the complainant did consent to the sexual activities,” Petrina Stokes said of her client, B. “There was no plan and [he] did nothing to intentionally assist anyone else.”
Annabel Cresswell, representing O, said her client also thought the unplanned sexual activity was consensual. She urged jurors to consider that consent can be “a nuanced and difficult assessment” to make in the moment.
The lawyer for a third defendant, known as S, acknowledged he was also in the van that morning but said he did not have sex with the woman at all. Lawyer Annabel Maxwell-Scott warned jurors that they would “hear some pretty horrific evidence”. She urged them to take an analytical approach and not get swayed by emotions.
Jurors then watched a two-and-a-half-hour recorded police interview with the complainant in which she sobbed as she tried to piece together what happened. She had started drinking around 9pm, ringing in the New Year with friends from her hostel underneath the SkyTower before the group made their way to Family Bar on K Rd.
She remembered arriving at the bar and dancing on the Latino music floor but then her memories started to fade.
“I can’t say it,” she told a police detective through tears as she was prompted to describe in explicit detail her next memory – waking up in the van with one of the men on top of her.
“I don’t want to have to say it,” she sobbed several times before repeating in a whisper: “I can’t say it. I can’t.”
She recalled the men seeming to talk to each other in another language but not to her.
“Something was off with his eyes,” she recalled of the person on top of her. “I think something made me really scared when I saw his eyes, so I just couldn’t look in his eyes.”
She sobbed more as she recalled remaining silent and lying still.
“I think during it I blacked out again,” she said.
The woman didn’t recall intercourse with the other two men, but prosecutors Culliney and Pip McNabb said enhanced CCTV from behind the Avondale warehouse showed all three occupants of the van appearing to take turns. Jurors were told they would be asked to watch the video many more times by the end of the trial.
DNA analysis confirmed that B and O had been sexually active with the woman. Although DNA analysis of S was inconclusive, prosecutors said S bragged to a friend that same morning that he had participated. S denies it.
Prosecutors noted at the start of today’s opening address that the complainant had consensually kissed B at the bar earlier that morning. But by the time it took “a dreadful turn” with her being led to the van, she neither consented nor could have due to her intoxication, Culliney said.
At 2.44am, just before she left K Rd, she sent a message to her friends on WhatsApp that appeared to be a misspelling of the German word for “help”, jurors were told.
The teen sent a follow-up message at about 3.43am: “Can somebody please help me?”
A paramedic would later describe her as being in a catatonic state. She was bruised, bleeding and in so much pain that a gynaecologist could not perform a full sex assault examination at hospital, jurors were told.
During the emotional police interview the next day, the complainant was upfront that she couldn’t remember most of what occurred.
“I’m scared that I’m not telling the truth, what’s the truth right now because I don’t know if I’m making it up or not,” she said through tears when asked to describe one of the men’s faces. “I don’t know if he was really there at this point. It’s all ... it’s so unclear.”
But she was adamant she never gave consent for what occurred.
When B was arrested three days later, he said he had been drinking for the first time in his life that morning and he couldn’t recall if the two had sex. He denied intercourse with the woman in a van.
The woman is expected to give live evidence via audio-video feed from Germany tomorrow morning when the trial resumes 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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