Devonport Naval Base court-martial: Roselia Epati testifies that touch was unintentional, not improper

Service member Roselia Epati denied she groped three fellow shipmates, including a superior officer, aboard the HMNZS Canterbury in February 2021. Photo / Michael Craig

A service member accused of having deliberately grabbed at an on-duty superior officer’s testicles as she laughingly returned to ship after a night of heavy drinking told a courtroom today that the incident has been misinterpreted and blown out of proportion.

“I’m so sorry, sir,” Able Steward Roselia Daniella Epati recalled telling the officer immediately after it happened. “I didn’t mean for that to happen. It was an accident. It wasn’t intentional.”

A panel of three fellow military members has been tasked with deciding if the defendant should be convicted of three counts of indecent assault involving different accusers. The group deliberated for two hours this afternoon at Devonport Naval Base in Auckland but was unable to reach a verdict. Deliberations are set to resume tomorrow.

Epati evaluated her intoxication level as about seven on a scale of one to 10 around 1am on February 19, 2021, as she returned to the HMNZS Canterbury after visiting a bar with colleagues in Lyttelton. She has always been someone who talks with her hands, but her gesticulations were more wild than normal because of her intoxication, she told Judge Maree MacKenzie and the panel today during the second day of her court-martial.

“You misjudge [when drinking] where your hands are going,” she said of what she described as an accidental touch of the officer’s upper thigh area. “I wouldn’t touch where he said I did.”

She described the officer, whose identity is suppressed because of the nature of the charge, as having turned red as others around her laughed.

“I think he got quite embarrassed,” she said, explaining that she continued to apologise — afraid she would get in trouble for her drinking but not imagining it would result in an indecency allegation.

The officer, who testified yesterday, said Epati had been stumbling up the gangplank. He said she rebuffed help from sober shipmates sent to help her, allegedly responding, “I’ve got balls, like these,” as she reached towards his crotch and grabbed “quite forcefully”.

Epati said under cross-examination that she did recall saying, “I’m not a pussy”, as she rebuffed help that morning and acknowledged that “I’ve got balls” sounded like something she might say in such circumstances.

“I say a lot of jokes, so that must have been one of them,” she said.

But she insisted that she didn’t add “like these” to the end of the phrase and that she didn’t intentionally reach for the officer.

A friend of Epati’s who was on duty as quartermaster that morning backed up many of the defendant’s recollections, confirming that she drunkenly swayed, was gesturing broadly with her arms and said repeatedly, “I’m not a pussy”, as she made her way up the gangplank. ACSS Paige McRoy said she didn’t see the touch directly but interpreted it based on all other circumstances to have been an accidental graze of the thigh.

Epati also denied allegations from two other shipmates, both women, who said Epati touched them inappropriately during the same drinking episode.

One woman said a person touched her buttocks as Epati left the ship hours earlier. While she didn’t see who touched her, when she turned around Epati was there and immediately afterwards reached out — unsuccessfully — to grab her groin, the accuser testified. The other woman said Epati grabbed her groin in the ship’s mess hall as the defendant demonstrated what had just happened with the officer.

During his closing argument this afternoon, Crown prosecutor Sam McMullan said it wasn’t plausible that all three accusers would have made up such allegations or misinterpreted what happened. It would be a “remarkable coincidence” to have been the victim of false allegations from three people in just a matter of hours, he said.

It doesn’t matter, he said, that the woman who said Epati touched her bottom didn’t initially intend to report the matter.

“She said to you what had happened to her wasn’t a big deal, but that doesn’t lessen what happened,” he said.

Defence lawyer Matthew Hague said during his closing argument that the panel should consider ambiguity, insincerity, misperceptions and faulty memory when it came to the testimony of his client’s accusers. It doesn’t necessarily have to have been a conspiracy to falsely accuse Epati so much as “a very human desire to be right” that created a bias in their faulty recollections of what occurred, he said.

Hague denied that his client touched either of the women at all — suggesting that one woman might have been mistaken about who touched her bottom and the other woman simply wasn’t telling the truth about being touched.

But even if the panel found Epati had touched the first accuser’s buttocks, it would also have to determine that she had intent to commit an indecent act, he argued.

“I’m not suggesting we have to like a touch on the bottom, but is that something that amounts to serious indecent assault?” he asked, pointing out that his client had been observed laughing and in a playful mood. “Was this the demeanour ... of someone who intended to be indecent?”