After her electronic monitoring bracelet had become \u201cpainful\u201d under her gumboot, arrangements were made for a security officer to come and refit it.<\/p>\n
Hunia arrived at her home late that evening, and she told the court he was \u201cunprofessional\u201d and she felt \u201cuncomfortable\u201d, as he was wearing his T-shirt inside out and smelled of body odour.<\/p>\n
The 57-year-old took measurements and photos and went to leave, and she claimed he said, \u201cit was nice to be doing this with a pretty woman\u201d.<\/p>\n
A short time later, he returned to take new photos, after the first ones he submitted were rejected by a technical adviser.<\/p>\n
Christopher Hunia has been on trial this week in the Tauranga District Court, charged with indecent assault.<\/p>\n
The Crown case was that, from this point, he spent too long at her address, and his physical contact with her was indecent. <\/p>\n
He was accused of \u201cabusing his position of power\u201d with a woman he was attracted to.<\/p>\n
The woman said that, as he attempted to get photos that were deemed adequate, he massaged her foot with it sandwiched between his hands, using a circular \u201cwashing\u201d motion.<\/p>\n
She claimed he asked questions about her tattoos, and traced his fingers up them, and she also accused him of hugging her as she walked towards the door, wrapping his arms around her, and pulling her on to his lap. <\/p>\n
He accepted touching her foot, but denied massaging it, denied hugging her, and said he only looked at her tattoos because she showed them to him.<\/p>\n
She said he touched scars on her arms, asking her if she was okay and offered to give her his number if she needed someone to talk to.<\/p>\n
The woman said this made her feel \u201cyucky\u201d as she didn\u2019t like people seeing them, and she said she told him he needed to leave.<\/p>\n
She claimed he said, \u201cI wish I could do naughty things to you\u201d as he left.<\/p>\n
She said she messaged her boss as soon as he left, giving an account of the allegations.<\/p>\n
The pair were having an affair at the time, and he didn\u2019t keep the messages, telling the court he had done a \u201cdeclutter\u201d of his phone as, at the time, he was trying to work on his marriage.<\/p>\n
The marriage ended, and the woman and her boss are now in a relationship.<\/p>\n
The defence suggested it was \u201cconvenient\u201d that the messages had been deleted, especially given he had apparently suggested she make a police report.<\/p>\n
However, he said that at the time, he didn\u2019t really think about it, and again said he\u2019d been trying to work on his marriage.<\/p>\n
Defence suggests \u2018implied consent\u2019<\/p>\n
Defence lawyer Alexandra Dawick urged the jury to consider whether Hunia could have had an honest belief in consent, given that the woman accepted she hadn\u2019t told him to stop.<\/p>\n
She said she had indicated discomfort in her body language, which Crown prosecutor Dan Coulson highlighted in his closing.<\/p>\n
She had \u201cput on her fluffy cow slipper to deter the defendant\u201d, Coulson said, and had not hugged back, declined his offers of his phone number, and shooed him to the door.<\/p>\n
The defence case was that the allegations were made up because the woman was unhappy that a male guard was sent to the address, when she\u2019d been under the impression only female officers would be sent to her home.<\/p>\n
Was it indecent?<\/p>\n
An employment investigation was conducted by First Security, and Hunia was interviewed as part of that process.<\/p>\n
The focus was the appropriateness of his behaviour in his work context, not whether he\u2019d committed a criminal offence.<\/p>\n
One of the staff involved gave evidence that when he asked Hunia if he\u2019d touched the woman\u2019s scars, Hunia\u2019s responded that they had looked like \u201cself-harm scars\u201d and he touched them to \u201ccheck if they were real\u201d.<\/p>\n
He was worried about her, and wanted to make sure she had someone to talk to.<\/p>\n
In Hunia\u2019s police interview, he accepted he shouldn\u2019t have offered his number, but denied touching her arms or scars.<\/p>\n
The defence submission was that offering his number may have been inappropriate, but it wasn\u2019t \u201cindecent\u201d, and was only because he was concerned about her.<\/p>\n
Dawick said that even if the jury concluded that the scars were touched by Hunia, that still wasn\u2019t enough.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust because someone touches someone else does not make it indecent,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Hunia resigned from First Security after the employment investigation.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The woman testified she felt \u201cuncomfortable\u201d and was scared to tell him to stop, as he was in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":135819,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[92900,13119,16426,1888,2740,92899,22500,111,43,139,69,1118,10932,2437],"class_list":["post-135818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-acquitted","tag-assaults","tag-christopher","tag-first","tag-former","tag-hunia","tag-indecent","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-of","tag-officer","tag-security"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135818"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135818\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/135819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}