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The son of prominent Māori activist and social justice icon Titewhai Harawira told jurors today that his mother briefly asked him in 1985 about the child sexual abuse accusations he is now on trial for.
“Is there anything behind these allegations?” the mother asked, according to Taiawa Harawira’s testimony inhis Auckland District Court trial.
Stunned by the suggestion, he flatly denied it and the subject was quickly dropped, he recounted, adding: “She never challenged me again. She said, ‘I believe you.’”
The accusations would nonetheless haunt him for the next three decades — resulting in almost annual confrontations with his accuser or her supporters even beyond his arrest in 2020, he said. One of the most recent confrontations, he said, was at his mother’s funeral one year ago.
Prosecutors described his testimony today — especially the idea that his mother would have been content to drop the subject without inquiring further — as “simply incredible” and “another example” of his dishonesty. Harawira’s lawyers, meanwhile, argued their client was the only credible witness during a two-week trial that even prosecutors acknowledged was beset by inconsistencies.
Jurors will soon decide for themselves. They are expected to begin deliberating tomorrow on 26 counts including rape, indecency with a girl under 12 and threatening to kill.
Harawira, now 67 and also known as the brother of former MP Hone Harawira, is accused of having targeted the young girl in the late 1970s and early 1980s in Avondale, Auckland, and at a home in Whangārei, Northland. He was also accused at the outset of the trial of abusing the girl at several marae during hīkoi or other protests but those charges were among the 18 dismissed mid-trial after prosecutors acknowledged there wasn’t enough evidence for a jury to consider.
“I never touched [her]. I never threatened [her],” Harawira insisted while being questioned by his lawyer on Friday and by the prosecution today, holding up the Bible prominently to show jurors as he was sworn in and adding repeatedly that he was speaking “God’s honest truth”.
When asked what motive the woman would have to lie, he suggested she was a troubled teen when her first outcry was made in the mid-1980s.
“I don’t know what’s going in in the mind of a teenage girl who admitted she was on drugs at the time,” he said.
He took the stand immediately after the accuser’s sister, who recounted hitting the defendant with a bat when she was about 6 or 7 after emerging from a game of hide-and-seek and catching him in the act of a rape.
“I could hear my sister kind of like moaning - I suppose you’d call it in distress,” she testified. “Taiawa was on top of her and she was sprawled out in the hallway.”
“You’re f***ing next!” she recalled the defendant yelling at her as she ran to lock herself in the toilet after swinging the bat at him. Her parents arrived shortly thereafter and Harawira acted as if nothing had happened, she said, while she and her sister locked themselves in the bathroom and tried to clean up her sister’s blood.
“She was different after that,” the woman said. “She was sitting in the bed shaking and rocking. I kept begging her to tell Dad.”
The woman said Harawira showed up at her door years later, when she was an adult.
“He said, ‘I’m a reborn again Christian and I’ve come to ask for your forgiveness,” she testified. “I said, ‘I’ll never forgive you for what you’ve done to my sister. Maybe you should go and ask her.’ I shut the door and that was the end of that.”
Taiawa Harawira stands outside Whakapara Marae near Whangārei in January 2011. He is currently on trial in Auckland District Court, accused of child sexual abuse more than 40 years ago. Photo / Malcolm Pullman
Harawira acknowledged today that he had found religion in the 1990s — and even ran Ezekiel 33, a Christian non-profit community centre reaching out to disadvantaged children. But that was several years after the sister lied about him showing up at her doorstep, he said.
“I found it bizarre,” he said of the woman’s account. “I can’t understand why she would just say something like that, because nothing like that ever happened — that’s God’s honest truth.”
During his closing address to jurors this afternoon, defence lawyer Ron Mansfield, KC, said the complainant, her sister and their mother — who also testified — all had different enough versions of events that none could be considered trustworthy. There were “dramatic inconsistencies” even between the complainant’s hours of interviews with police before the trial and her testimony in the witness box, he said, suggesting the charges that “disappeared” showed the Crown also didn’t have faith in the woman’s shifting account.
“It beggars belief, frankly, that . . . what they say about anything is reliable,” Mansfield said. “At its very highest, you’d have to be unsure, saying, ‘We don’t know who to believe.’”
But prosecutor Robin McCoubrey urged jurors not to get caught up in an “all or nothing” mentality — deciding that if the complainant or witnesses got one detail wrong the whole case crumbles. After more than 40 years, it would be extraordinary if some of the finer details weren’t muddled due to the passage of time, he said.
“Sometimes we do get details wrong — it doesn’t mean we forget the fundamental things that happen to us,” he said before quoting the complainant directly: “The incidents themselves, I ain’t ever going to forget those.”
McCoubrey described the “really visceral” childhood recollections of the complainant and her sister as having “the ring of truth to it”, whereas the defence suggestion that all of the Crown witnesses are lying in an effort to frame an innocent man doesn’t.
He also noted again what Harawira told police during his arrest: “I know what this is about. I’ve been waiting for 30 years for this.” The defence argued that the statement was an acknowledgement only that the accusation had been circulating in the community for decades before police got involved, but McCoubrey suggested it instead showed the defendant in a moment of honesty about past misdeeds.
“The simple truth of what he said on arrest . . . is no more than him realising his past had caught up with him because he did these things,” the prosecutor said.
The trial is set to resume tomorrow afternoon, when Judge Mary Beth Sharp is expected to sum up the evidence before sending jurors off to begin deliberations.
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.
