Warning: This story contains sexual assault allegations.
The defence for a navy lieutenant charged with rape is questioning why the complainant continued to have a relationship with him, and whether their break-up motivated her accusations.
The accused lieutenant is before a court martial at the Devonport Naval Base on Auckland’s North Shore this week.
He faces three charges of rape, relating to allegations that he violated a woman’s consent by attempting to have intercourse without a condom three times on the same night in September 2025.
The woman had given consent for some sexual activity, but not intercourse, due to concerns over sexually transmitted infections.
The pair had consensual sex the following night, using a condom, and formed a relationship afterwards.
The lieutenant denies that any non-consensual activity took place.
Defence lawyer Aster Gold asked the complainant why she agreed to go to the defendant’s room the night after she was allegedly assaulted.
“You weren’t worried about being attacked?” she asked.
“No, I felt safe, I felt like my words had got through to him,” the complainant replied.
“I made a conscious decision to suppress this. In the morning after these incidents I was hesitant, but as the day went on it was easier to push it aside and live in the fantasy of just trying to, like, get through.”
Given the complainant’s primary concern was the lack of a condom, Gold asked why she did not provide her own.
“As I said before, I don’t have a penis,” she replied.
“People have different sized penises, so I don’t buy a bunch of different sized condoms in preparation.”
The pair became a couple and met a few more times before drifting apart after a handful of weeks.
“What [the defendant] had told me was that he wanted to keep seeing me over the six months he was in the country, and every time we had discussed meeting up, he flaked,” the complainant recounted.
“I would’ve appreciated someone being direct and saying ‘hey, I don’t want to pursue this anymore’.”
The defendant broke up with the complainant over text later in October.
“Did you get pretty angry about this?” Gold asked.
“No, not really, because it’s what I expected to happen,” the complainant replied.
“But I did call him a ‘f***ing coward,’ which is true.”
The pair didn’t communicate until late November, when they attended the same social event.
“I was walking into the toilets and he was walking out of the toilets,” she recalled.
“He was really chummy given how he had treated me.”
The complainant later saw the defendant on the dance floor with another woman.
“When you saw him with this other woman, she was all over him, wasn’t she?” Gold asked.
“I would agree with that,” she replied.
“It was, one, upsetting to see [my] rapist. And then, two, it didn’t seem like she knew him beforehand and I thought ‘oh my god what if he does something to her, too’.”
The complainant said she later confronted the woman while she was alone and told her that the defendant had sexually assaulted her.
“Near the end of the night you saw this woman leave with [the defendant], didn’t you?” Gold continued.
“Would it be fair to say you were quite angry?”
“I think I was very frustrated, because saying in this public forum that I had been sexually assaulted was a very vulnerable thing,” the complainant replied.
“I had done everything I could to hide it. I said it out loud for the first time that night.”
The complainant confronted the defendant and the woman once again.
“You were yelling at them as you were walking towards them weren’t you?” Gold asked.
“No I wouldn’t use the word ‘yelling,’ I said ‘I warned you’,” the complainant said.
“That’s not correct. You were yelling ‘I warned you’ four or five times,” Gold pressed.
“I may have said it more than once, but I definitely didn’t yell it,” she replied.
“I’m suggesting to you that when you told this woman that you warned her, you were trying to get her away from [the defendant] because you didn’t want her leaving with him because you were jealous,” Gold said.
“I 100 percent disagree,” the complainant responded.
Gold suggested the moment the complainant saw the defendant dancing with another woman was the moment she fabricated the accusation.
“I don’t know why I would make up something so personal and vulnerable and say it in a place where people I work with can hear me,” the complainant said.
“The cost of reporting my sexual assault is so much higher than doing nothing about it.”
The lieutenant’s side.
The defence began its case by calling the defendant himself to give evidence.
He described the moment he met the complainant.
“We got along like a house on fire, it was clear from the start we had similar personalities and the conversation was just flowing,” he recalled.
“I didn’t want to make any open advances in front of everybody or make her uncomfortable, but she was definitely sending the right signals.”
He said after inviting the complainant to his room, he kissed her and she reciprocated.
“She approached me and straddled my lap. She reinitiated the intimacy between us, she started kissing me and I just took her lead with that one,” he said.
“It got to the natural point where I thought it was time to progress to sexual intercourse. I positioned myself between her legs, but before there was any contact between my penis and her vagina, that’s when she first asked if I had a condom.”
He said the complainant’s mood shifted when he told her he didn’t.
“It was almost instantaneous that it changed from very romantic to definitely… It wasn’t a romantic mood anymore,” he said.
“She said to me something along the lines of ‘why the f**k would you invite someone to your room if you didn’t have a condom,’ it was clear she expected me to have a condom on me.”
The defendant said at that point the sexual activity stopped.
“It was clear to me that was her preference. She made it clear, so we didn’t proceed,” he said.
“We just lay down together, she seemed to calm herself down so we started cuddling.”
Where to get help:
Sexual Violence