6 Mar 2020

Police rape trial: 'I should have been safe'

7:56 pm on 6 March 2020

A policewoman has told a jury in the rape trial of another officer that, with other police in the motel at the time, she should have been safe from sexual assault.

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Photo: RNZ / Patrice Allen

The man, whose identity is suppressed, is on trial at Auckland District Court defending charges of sexual violation and indecent assault.

He is accused of groping the woman and later raping her while she slept in a Kerikeri motel they were staying in during Waitangi commemorations.

The jury listened this afternoon to a two-minute recording the woman made on her phone right after the alleged assault.

In it, you can hear the man's muffled voice the woman saying, "I denied you earlier and I've woken up to you f****** me".

She told the jury she'd felt her phone when she slid up the bed and away from the man and it was instinct to make a recording.

"I just felt like he was manipulating me. He was trying to turn it and pretend like nothing had happened when something had happened."

"My focus was working out what the f*** had happened and just trying to protect myself. It was just something I could do because I did not know what to do."

The court has heard the woman and the defendant had been acquaintances for about a year but she was largely unfamiliar with many officers at the motel.

"I was with a whole bunch of boys and I should have been safe. I was with police colleagues and I didn't feel I could go to someone at that time.

"I did not know what to do. It shouldn't have happened to me. I did not know what to do."

The man's defence lawyer has told the jury the woman was awake that night and any sexual activity was consensual and part of a prearranged hook up.

When asked if the woman had invited the man into her room or made a plan for him to visit her later that night she said "absolutely not".

The jury heard a second recording the woman made in which you can hear her supervisor enter her room to talk to her before seeking out a superior.

In the clip, the woman could be heard telling another female officer she hated being asked what she wanted after the incident.

"He's the supervisor and I've told him what's happened to me so he should be doing what he's supposed to do," she said.

"I told him what had happened to me and I don't want to be f****** here right now.

"I didn't want to go down this path but what happened to me wasn't right and it shouldn't have happened."

The woman told the court she was aware of the process that followed a sexual allegation but went ahead with it anyway.

She cried, her voice shaking, as she descibed the medical examination she underwent that morning with a specialist doctor.

"You tell them what happened and essentially then you just get treated like a specimen or a piece of meat.

"And then have to just strip off and be swabbed for them to gather evidence and then put on foreign clothes."

The trial before Judge Evangelos Thomas and a jury will resume on Monday.

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