Warning: This article discusses rape and sexual assault.
A Wellington trial has continued with the defence cross-examining the first woman to give evidence against a musician accused of multiple sexual assaults.
The man is accused of eight sex offences including four rape charges in the Wellington region between 2017 and 2020.
Six women are complainants in the case.
Defence lawyer Val Nisbet focused his questions on what the complainant remembered from the night she alleges she was raped by the now 25-year-old man.
The woman was celebrating the birthday of herself and a close friend’s by holding a party, which the man attended along with a mutual friend.
She says she’d never met him before that night.
She told the defence she wasn’t sure how she got to the party or what she wear wearing, but drank alcohol at the party, danced and socialised before her mum took her home to their house because of her intoxication.
“I don’t remember socialising with [the defendant] at the party… he was quiet,” she said.
“Are you sure you didn’t walk back with the defendant, [name suppressed] and [name suppressed]?” Nisbet asked.
The woman denied this happened, while the defendant has previously told his lawyer it did.
Nisbet then asked wider questions about the woman’s social life including how often she partied, if she was often affected by alcohol at parties and if she’d ever taken the drug MDMA.
She said she did often feel the affects of alcohol at parties and didn’t know why her having taken the drug before was relevant.
The lawyer asked her if it was “pretty hard” to remember “everything” from the night of the party, to which she replied it was because of the time that had since passed.
“Do you have issues with your memory?” the lawyer asked.
“I have issues with my memory of that night,” she said.
“Is that because you were affected by alcohol?”
“No, because I had a traumatic event happen that night.”
The defence lawyer put it to the complainant that the accused said people weren’t “very drunk” at the party, and that he had talked to her that night.
“He remembers you not slurring or stumbling or falling over, he doesn’t think you were badly affected by alcohol at the party,” he said.
“I was well kept even though I was drunk,” the woman said.
Nisbet then put to the woman that the accused said she invited him to stay in her room, that they got ready for bed together and that they were facing each other in bed with her eyes open when they started to kiss consensually and were rubbing each other’s bodies.
The woman denied all of these claims.
“That’s not what happened.”
The defence lawyer then put to her that she didn’t remember rubbing each other’s bodies.
“It’s not what happened,” she repeated.
Nisbet continued to put claims of the sexual act to the woman, including that the sex wasn’t violent, but she denied all these statements.
The lawyer questioned that the man’s social media message to her the next day, ‘thanks for the night buttercup’, was a friendly response to what had occurred sexually the night before.
“That would be what he told himself,” the complainant said.
The questioning then turned to when the man and woman had sex two weeks after the party, which both agree was consensual.
After a group of people were hanging out at a café, the pair went back to another property.
The accused claims they went there together, where as the woman claims he followed her.
“There was never a discussion,” she said.
The lawyer questioned that she asked the man to come home with her, to which she said she may have.
Nisbet read out a part of the woman’s evidential police video where she said on that occasion too, the man was choking her a lot of the time while they had sex, and that she then knew it was his “kink” and that made her feel less sure about the previous time “being rapey”.
The woman said this was part of a coping mechanism where she was trying to “redeem him” in her head to help convince herself the rape didn’t occur.
“Just trying to convince myself that’s not what happened… that’s why I was with him the second time.”
But she said she always knew what happened the first time was rape.
“He had sex with me when I was asleep… he came into my bed without invitation or anything.”
The lawyer for the accused said on a third occasion, the pair had consensual sex, a claim which the woman denied.
The accused and the woman both claim to have stopped contact with each other, disagreeing on who cut contact first.
The lawyer questioned whether the woman complained to police and made out the incident was rape after seeing social media allegations because she was annoyed the accused didn’t want to have a relationship with her.
She denied this and said she didn’t have the confidence to go to the police after the incident occurred.
People that were at the party also spoke in court today as witnesses for the Crown.
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