The charges relate to incidents that allegedly occurred during the final months of the marriage, which ended several years ago.
The woman, who began giving evidence on Tuesday, has been outlining details of their 17-year marriage this week.
In giving her evidence, she told the court that the man was controlling throughout their entire relationship.
She said that during their marriage, her husband insisted she keep her weight down, making her wear her wedding dress top on their wedding anniversary, to show she could still get into it.
But the defence maintains the marriage was a loving and supportive one.
Today, during cross-examination, the man’s lawyer Lucie Scott, asked the woman about a phone call to the police last year.
Arriving at the house, police had found her in a catatonic state, which the woman described as a “freeze response”, something she agreed they’d previously encountered during callouts for earlier suicide attempts.
When she was spoken to at the hospital, Scott said, the woman told staff that her ex-husband had come into the laundry and threatened her that she wouldn’t wake up in the morning.
“Shouldn’t wake up in the morning,” the woman corrected her.
She later said that her ex-husband tried to strangle her with a rope, which she clarified was blue plastic packing tape.
A photograph taken at the hospital showed a mark on the woman’s neck.
But the woman rejected Scott’s suggestion that she’d inflicted the injury on herself, having made a similar attempt several years earlier.
“No, it would be absurd for me to plan what you are suggesting,” she said, adding that the circumstances in the laundry were very different from the earlier attempt.
The woman did agree that she couldn’t recall how her ex-husband got into the laundry, which was typically locked.
But she told the court that, having worked through it with her therapist, she wasn’t sure how he got into the laundry, but “there’s every possibility that I let him in”.
The defence says he was never there.
Three months later, the court heard the woman again called the police, saying she’d seen a knife and her ex-husband’s shirt outside the laundry.
At the time, her husband was out of town.
The woman was asked if she thought her ex-husband had put it there to threaten her.
“I was scared there was someone who might be helping him. This is what being in this type of relationship is like,” she said.
It’s messed me up massively
During re-examination, Crown prosecutor Anselm Williams asked the woman to comment on the defence’s assertion that in recounting what happened in the laundry, she was either not telling the truth or had created a memory.
The woman was adamant she didn’t hallucinate and said there was nothing in her mental health notes that made her susceptible to hallucinations.
She rejected any suggestion she’d made anything up, including the fresh allegations, given her ex-husband was already on bail.
“It’s messed me up massively,” she said.
Asked why she didn’t leave the marriage sooner, the woman explained that she’d tried to leave several times, but events outside her control, including the Covid pandemic, had prevented that.
The Crown is expected to close its case on Monday, and the defence will then open its case.
Catherine Hutton is an Open Justice reporter, based in Wellington. She has worked as a journalist at the Waikato Times and RNZ. Most recently she was working as a media adviser at the Ministry of Justice.
