court heard<\/a> one boy fell asleep early in the evening and the girl said at some point her best friend and the best friend\u2019s boyfriend left the room. It was at that point the teen began to kiss her.<\/p>\nUnder cross-examination, she attempted to explain how she responded in terms of whether she kissed him back, saying \u201cI did, but I didn\u2019t\u201d.<\/p>\n
Under re-examination, she explained she had kissed back briefly at first but then stopped.<\/p>\n
When asked about what happened next, she said she was clear: he had unbuttoned her jeans and used his hand to violate her. She said he also took her hand and used it on himself.<\/p>\n
The girl said she said no, but under cross-examination clarified this was in the form of a \u201cwhisper\u201d.<\/p>\n
She also said she mumbled, \u201cI don\u2019t want this\u201d. She claims the teen told her \u201cit\u2019s okay\u201d and continued the violation.<\/p>\n
She said she became \u201cfrozen\u201d and told the court she \u201cdidn\u2019t know what to do\u201d and had her legs \u201cglued shut\u201d, but he continued.<\/p>\n
The court heard she was 15 at the time and had never done \u201canything like that before\u201d.<\/p>\n
She said she may have been expecting a kiss but nothing more and was aware the teen was older than her.<\/p>\n
She said the alleged violation happened when the lights were off, and in the 15 or so minutes before she got a text from her mum to say she\u2019d arrived to pick her and her friend up.<\/p>\n
The court heard she\u2019d felt the phone vibrate under her leg as the alleged violation was happening and pulled her hand away to retrieve it.<\/p>\n
She saw the message, stood up, buttoned up her jeans and told her friend they needed to leave.<\/p>\n
She couldn\u2019t be sure if her friend had been in the room the whole time, as \u201cit was dark\u201d. She said it was all a \u201cblur\u201d when the alleged sexual contact was happening, and she was focused on what was happening, not on the rest of the room.<\/p>\n
However, she recalled her friend had been in the room when she said it was time to go and the friend saw her buttoning up her jeans.<\/p>\n
However, the friend told the teen\u2019s lawyer, in her evidence, that she couldn\u2019t remember seeing the girl buttoning up her pants.<\/p>\n
She said she never left the girl\u2019s side in the evening and never saw anything other than kissing between the girl and the teen.<\/p>\n
However, she did say there were times during the night when she was kissing her own boyfriend, not looking at the other two.<\/p>\n
The teen claims nothing other than kissing happened and denies they were ever left alone in the room.<\/p>\n
The friend confirmed that some weeks later the girl told her about the alleged violation, but she didn\u2019t see it happen at the time.<\/p>\n
The teen\u2019s lawyer, Rachael Adams, said in her opening statement all that happened was a teenage hook-up \u2013 some making out and cuddling.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we used to call pashing,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
When the teen had become the subject of \u201cugly allegations and gossip\u201d, the girl had \u201cbuyer\u2019s remorse\u201d, was \u201cembarrassed\u201d and had shifted from wishing she hadn\u2019t done it to saying she didn\u2019t choose to do it.<\/p>\n
The girl made a formal complaint more than a year after the alleged events of the night.<\/p>\n
A \u2018range of red flags\u2019, says Crown<\/p>\n
In the Crown opening, prosecutor Laura Clay said the girl\u2019s mother would give evidence to say she\u2019d observed changes in the girl\u2019s behaviour in the months after the alleged sexual assault \u2013 a \u201crange of red flags\u201d that indicated she wasn\u2019t okay.<\/p>\n
The girl\u2019s mother told the court about the day her daughter confided in her and her husband about the alleged violation.<\/p>\n
The girl had pointed to a news article about the teen, before revealing what had happened to her, and when and where it happened. <\/p>\n
The mother said she remembered the night in question, as she had picked her daughter up from the address just before midnight.<\/p>\n
She recalled in the month after the alleged assault she noticed a change in her daughter\u2019s behaviour \u2013 she had become \u201cwithdrawn\u201d and had started wearing a large hoodie.<\/p>\n
As time went on, she began to notice the girl had cuts on her legs. When she asked her daughter about it, her daughter was dismissive and didn\u2019t want to talk.<\/p>\n
But then she saw cuts on her arms too and made arrangements for her daughter to see a GP.<\/p>\n
She was referred to counselling, which continued through the rest of that year. <\/p>\n
When the girl was asked about the self-harm during cross-examination, she broke down in tears.<\/p>\n
She said she\u2019d had a difficult time with the stresses of school and exams, friendship difficulties and the events with the teen boy affecting her mental health.<\/p>\n
Adams said she has rewritten history and, after hearing \u201cbad things\u201d about the teen, she was \u201cembarrassed\u201d.<\/p>\n
Adams put to her that she \u201crecreated events\u201d to use this as \u201ca way of blaming what was going on in your life on someone else\u201d and eliciting sympathy from others.<\/p>\n
The girl denied that, stating she doesn\u2019t like sympathy.<\/p>\n
The trial before Judge Paul Geoghegan continues.<\/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 Crown said on the evening of the alleged assault the group were gathered at the boy\u2019s house,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":77244,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1117,1554,806,17704,6726,60159,9787,12632,1445,13838,13637,5158,111,43,139,69,1118,3111,60158,17703,15386,26639,5163,10706,672,50638,102,4741],"class_list":["post-77243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-accused","tag-alleged","tag-as","tag-assault","tag-become","tag-disclosures","tag-female","tag-friend","tag-friends","tag-girls","tag-hung","tag-man","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-of","tag-out","tag-selfharming","tag-sexual","tag-sexually","tag-shed","tag-teen","tag-teenage","tag-teens","tag-violating","tag-with","tag-young"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77243","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=77243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77243\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}