Some of the group had headed back to a colleague’s house after the races finished.
Now, one of those men, who has name suppression, is before the Tauranga District Court where he’s being tried before a jury on one charge of sexual violation.
The court heard it was a sunny summer’s day where the bubbles, rosé and gin had flowed freely and a mix of colleagues, spouses, friends and neighbours enjoyed conversations around an outdoor fire.
A woman, who was connected to the workplace and was friends with the homeowner, said she’d been having a good time, catching up with long-standing friends and people she’d just met.
Her husband had left the gathering early, but she had stayed on.
The gathering had continued, with more drinks and festivities, and in the early hours of the morning, a few people stayed on at the house.
The woman told the court she was very drunk by this time, and couldn’t remember large parts of the evening.
She went to bed in one of the spare bedrooms, having been shown to the room by one of the homeowners.
She says she blacked out, but woke in the early hours to a man, whom she’d only met on a handful of occasions, allegedly “forcefully” raping her.
She gave evidence that as she realised what was happening she kept thinking, “say something, say something” before she used her most “stern” voice to say: “Get the f*** off me”.
She alleges in her evidential video to police that he then “scurried off”.
She went back to sleep but says when she woke later that morning and went to the bathroom, she’d felt sore.
She looked in the bathroom mirror and thought, “what the f***, has this really happened?”
The woman said she left the room and went to find somewhere to charge her phone, which had run out of battery overnight.
She said told the court she hadn’t planned to talk about it with the homeowner, but he had asked her if she was okay.
She became upset as she told him what had allegedly happened.
The homeowner went and got his wife, and then called the woman’s husband to come and collect her.
He’d then called the police.
The defence case is that the woman made up the offending, and the incident never happened.
Defence lawyer Craig Tuck said to the woman the incident had been an “absolute fantasy” and the defendant had never touched her.
The woman responded that she “wish[ed]” she had made it up.
She then wouldn’t have endured the loss of confidence and income, the post-traumatic stress she alleges are the result of the incident.
He asked her about her memory, given how much she had been drinking that night.
He said that her memory had been “shot to pieces”.
She accepted that there were large parts of the evening she could not remember and that she had drunk more than she usually would.
However, she said her memory of the alleged rape was clear.
The court also heard from the homeowners where the incident happened who had both been longstanding friends of the woman.
They described her distress and hysteria the morning after the alleged sexual assault, and their role in reporting the incident to police.
One of them said the woman had been “sobbing uncontrollably” when describing the alleged assault.
The trial continues before Judge William Lawson.
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.
