A man has been accused of sexually violating a 15-year-old girl some years ago in Tauranga when he was 16. Photo / 123rf
Warning: This story includes details of alleged sexual assault and may be distressing.
A jury has learned that a man on trial for sexual violation has previous convictions for sexual offending against young women.
However, the defendant, who cannot be named, maintained he did not commit the previous sexual offences for which he was convicted and did not offend against the girl in the current case.
The defendant, now a young adult, has been accused of sexually violating a 15-year-old girl some years ago in Tauranga when he was 16.
While giving evidence, he claimed he and the girl had consensually kissed and that she only complained he had sexually assaulted her after “she heard some nasty things about me that weren’t true”.
This permitted the Crown to then ask him whether those “nasty things” related to allegations of sexual offending against other girls. He responded: “Yes.”
“You were convicted at a trial of those?” Crown prosecutor Ian Murray asked.
“Yes,” the defendant replied.
“So, despite the fact that you were convicted at trial of doing those things, you still maintain they aren’t true?”
“Yes,” he said.
Murray asked him if he considered himself to be the “beacon of truth” amid what the defendant claimed were false allegations from multiple women, including the current complainant.
“Yes,” the defendant replied.
He is on trial in the Tauranga District Court charged with sexual violation and an alternative charge of sexual conduct with a young person.
The trial has heard that on the night of the alleged assault, the defendant and the girl had been hanging out with a few friends, including the girl’s best friend and the best friend’s boyfriend.
The defendant’s father had been supervising and they were instructed to keep the door open and the lights on.
In evidence, the father said he’d checked on the group “six or seven times” throughout the evening and saw them chatting and listening to music.
He said he monitored who was coming and going from the room.
However, the man conceded he’d not seen the light turn off towards the end of the evening, which all the teens accepted happened for a brief window.
But from there, the evidence of the teens deviates.
The girl said the defendant took an opportunity to kiss her, and while she briefly kissed him back, she “pulled away”. He then unbuttoned her jeans and allegedly violated her.
She said she told him “no” and “mumbled” that she didn’t want it, but he repeated “it’s okay”.
The alleged assault stopped when a text made the girl’s phone vibrate under her leg and she saw her mum had arrived to pick her up.
She got up to leave while buttoning up her jeans.
In her closing address today, defence lawyer Rachael Adams scrutinised the girl’s evidence on who was in the room when the alleged assault happened, suggesting this was key, particularly when contrasted with the evidence of her best friend.
Adams said the girl’s evidence was best described as “shifting sands”.
She’d gone from saying the best friend and boyfriend weren’t in the room, to maybe being in the room, to saying she couldn’t be sure because it “was dark”, Adams said.
The girl made a variety of statements across her evidential video interview and her evidence in court about when they left and when they returned to the room.
The Crown told the jury this was entirely understandable, as she wasn’t focused on who was in the room; she was only thinking about the alleged assault, which had left her “frozen”.
The gaps in her memory, inconsistencies and concessions, and her responses of “I don’t know” were because she was a truthful witness doing her best to recall a night from some years earlier, and not giving evidence from a script, Murray said in his closing.
However, Adams said the best friend was clear that she never left the room and she “saw nothing”.
She had not seen the defendant unzip the girl’s jeans, nor use his hand to violate her, nor had she heard her friend say “no”, as she said she did.
Adams said the girl knew it was implausible for the assault to have happened while there were others in the room, as even with the lights off, there was light coming in from the open door.
The teens had been sitting “shoulder to shoulder” on a mattress throughout the night.
When Adams asked the girl why her friend didn’t hear her say “no”, she responded that she’d said it in a whisper.
Adams characterised this as a “clumsy attempt” to “explain away what was becoming an increasingly unlikely story”.
When she was pressed under cross-examination to be clear about whether the other teens had been in the room, Adams said the girl used a fallback position of “I don’t know”.
Adams described the girl’s evidence as vague and “all over the place” and not strong enough to support a guilty verdict.
Judge Paul Geoghegan, in his summing up, said inconsistencies were inevitable but the key issue for the jury was to look at the “nature” of any inconsistency and determine if there was an explanation for it.
He summarised the different interpretations of the evidence put forward by the Crown and defence as “one person’s concession is another person’s inconsistency”.
While the defence criticised the girl’s lack of clarity, the Crown criticised the defendant and his father for the opposite.
Murray said their evidence was like a “script”, and they remembered too much detail for what should have been a completely unmemorable night, given there was nothing unusual about it, except that it became the subject of allegations more than a year later.
The fact they said they could remember who left the room when and who didn’t leave the room didn’t make sense, he said.
The evidence had been designed to “coattail” on the statement given by the best friend and provided to them as part of the disclosure.
Murray said the best friend had other things on her mind that night, including “kissing and making out with her boyfriend”, and would not have been intentionally looking to see what the others were doing.
She had told the court she had seen them kissing but said they had also been “rolling around” on top of one another.
However, she also confirmed the girl had confided in her about the alleged assault in the weeks after, even though a formal police complaint didn’t follow for more than a year.
Murray said it didn’t make sense for the girl to have made up a complaint to her friend if she had been, as the defence argued, “embarrassed” about consensual kissing with the teen boy, who was the subject of rumour and allegation.
Adams referred, in closing, to the girl being a “troubled” young woman, whose self-harming and stress from exams and friendship woes had left her looking for an “external explanation for what’s going on in her”, and had made up the allegations to get sympathy and support.
The Crown attacked the teen boy’s credibility on the basis he told the jury the allegations “weren’t true”, despite his convictions suggesting the opposite.
He had been attempting to “mislead” the jury, Murray said.
The judge warned the jury about how they should consider the defendant’s previous convictions.
They weren’t to apply it to the reasoning of the facts of this case, to think that “because [he’s] convicted of sexual offending against young women... that he must be or is probably guilty of the charges he is now facing”.
“It would be totally wrong for you to do that,” Judge Geoghegan said.
But the jury was permitted to consider the convictions when assessing the defendant’s credibility, given his assertion that “the rumours weren’t true”.
The jury has retired to consider its verdict.
Hannah Bartlett is a Tauranga-based Open Justice reporter at NZME. She previously covered court and local government for the Nelson Mail, and before that was a radio reporter at Newstalk ZB.