{"id":81833,"date":"2025-10-16T09:06:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-16T09:06:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/81833\/"},"modified":"2025-10-16T09:06:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-16T09:06:07","slug":"jury-hears-defendant-in-tauranga-sexual-offending-trial-is-a-convicted-sex-offender","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/81833\/","title":{"rendered":"Jury hears defendant in Tauranga sexual offending trial is a convicted sex offender"},"content":{"rendered":"

While giving evidence, he claimed he and the girl had consensually kissed<\/a> and that she only complained he had sexually assaulted her after \u201cshe heard some nasty things about me that weren\u2019t true\u201d.<\/p>\n

This permitted the Crown to then ask him whether those \u201cnasty things\u201d related to allegations of sexual offending<\/a> against other girls. He responded: \u201cYes.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou were convicted at a trial of those?\u201d Crown prosecutor Ian Murray asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cYes,\u201d the defendant replied.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo, despite the fact that you were convicted at trial of doing those things, you still maintain they aren\u2019t true?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYes,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Murray asked him if he considered himself to be the \u201cbeacon of truth\u201d amid what the defendant claimed were false allegations from multiple women, including the current complainant.<\/p>\n

\u201cYes,\u201d the defendant replied.<\/p>\n

The alleged sexual assault<\/p>\n

He is on trial in the Tauranga District Court<\/a> charged with sexual violation and an alternative charge of sexual conduct with a young person.<\/p>\n

The trial has heard that on the night of the alleged assault, the defendant and the girl had been hanging out with a few friends, including the girl\u2019s best friend and the best friend\u2019s boyfriend.<\/p>\n

The defendant\u2019s father had been supervising and they were instructed to keep the door open and the lights on.<\/p>\n

In evidence, the father said he\u2019d checked on the group \u201csix or seven times\u201d throughout the evening and saw them chatting and listening to music.<\/p>\n

\"TheThe trial is being heard in the Tauranga District Court.<\/p>\n

He said he monitored who was coming and going from the room.<\/p>\n

However, the man conceded he\u2019d not seen the light turn off towards the end of the evening, which all the teens accepted happened for a brief window.<\/p>\n

But from there, the evidence of the teens deviates.<\/p>\n

The girl said the defendant took an opportunity to kiss her, and while she briefly kissed him back, she \u201cpulled away\u201d. He then unbuttoned her jeans and allegedly violated her. <\/p>\n

She said she told him \u201cno\u201d and \u201cmumbled\u201d that she didn\u2019t want it, but he repeated \u201cit\u2019s okay\u201d.<\/p>\n

The alleged assault stopped when a text made the girl\u2019s phone vibrate under her leg and she saw her mum had arrived to pick her up.<\/p>\n

She got up to leave while buttoning up her jeans.<\/p>\n

The evidence examined<\/p>\n

In her closing address today, defence lawyer Rachael Adams scrutinised the girl\u2019s evidence on who was in the room when the alleged assault happened, suggesting this was key, particularly when contrasted with the evidence of her best friend.<\/p>\n

Adams said the girl\u2019s evidence was best described as \u201cshifting sands\u201d. <\/p>\n

She\u2019d gone from saying the best friend and boyfriend weren\u2019t in the room, to maybe being in the room, to saying she couldn\u2019t be sure because it \u201cwas dark\u201d, Adams said.<\/p>\n

The girl made a variety of statements across her evidential video interview and her evidence in court about when they left and when they returned to the room.<\/p>\n

The Crown told the jury this was entirely understandable, as she wasn\u2019t focused on who was in the room; she was only thinking about the alleged assault, which had left her \u201cfrozen\u201d.<\/p>\n

The gaps in her memory, inconsistencies and concessions, and her responses of \u201cI don\u2019t know\u201d were because she was a truthful witness doing her best to recall a night from some years earlier, and not giving evidence from a script, Murray said in his closing.<\/p>\n

However, Adams said the best friend was clear that she never left the room and she \u201csaw nothing\u201d.<\/p>\n

She had not seen the defendant unzip the girl\u2019s jeans, nor use his hand to violate her, nor had she heard her friend say \u201cno\u201d, as she said she did.<\/p>\n

Adams said the girl knew it was implausible for the assault to have happened while there were others in the room, as even with the lights off, there was light coming in from the open door.<\/p>\n

The teens had been sitting \u201cshoulder to shoulder\u201d on a mattress throughout the night.<\/p>\n

When Adams asked the girl why her friend didn\u2019t hear her say \u201cno\u201d, she responded that she\u2019d said it in a whisper.<\/p>\n

Adams characterised this as a \u201cclumsy attempt\u201d to \u201cexplain away what was becoming an increasingly unlikely story\u201d.<\/p>\n

When she was pressed under cross-examination to be clear about whether the other teens had been in the room, Adams said the girl used a fallback position of \u201cI don\u2019t know\u201d.<\/p>\n

Adams described the girl\u2019s evidence as vague and \u201call over the place\u201d and not strong enough to support a guilty verdict.<\/p>\n

Considering the convictions<\/p>\n

Judge Paul Geoghegan, in his summing up, said inconsistencies were inevitable but the key issue for the jury was to look at the \u201cnature\u201d of any inconsistency and determine if there was an explanation for it.<\/p>\n

He summarised the different interpretations of the evidence put forward by the Crown and defence as \u201cone person\u2019s concession is another person\u2019s inconsistency\u201d.<\/p>\n

While the defence criticised the girl\u2019s lack of clarity, the Crown criticised the defendant and his father for the opposite.<\/p>\n

Murray said their evidence was like a \u201cscript\u201d, and they remembered too much detail for what should have been a completely unmemorable night, given there was nothing unusual about it, except that it became the subject of allegations more than a year later.<\/p>\n

The fact they said they could remember who left the room when and who didn\u2019t leave the room didn\u2019t make sense, he said.<\/p>\n

The evidence had been designed to \u201ccoattail\u201d on the statement given by the best friend and provided to them as part of the disclosure.<\/p>\n

Murray said the best friend had other things on her mind that night, including \u201ckissing and making out with her boyfriend\u201d, and would not have been intentionally looking to see what the others were doing.<\/p>\n

She had told the court she had seen them kissing but said they had also been \u201crolling around\u201d on top of one another.<\/p>\n

However, she also confirmed the girl had confided in her about the alleged assault in the weeks after, even though a formal police complaint didn\u2019t follow for more than a year.<\/p>\n

Murray said it didn\u2019t make sense for the girl to have made up a complaint to her friend if she had been, as the defence argued, \u201cembarrassed\u201d about consensual kissing with the teen boy, who was the subject of rumour and allegation.<\/p>\n

Adams referred, in closing, to the girl being a \u201ctroubled\u201d young woman, whose self-harming and stress from exams and friendship woes had left her looking for an \u201cexternal explanation for what\u2019s going on in her\u201d, and had made up the allegations to get sympathy and support.<\/p>\n

The Crown attacked the teen boy\u2019s credibility on the basis he told the jury the allegations \u201cweren\u2019t true\u201d, despite his convictions suggesting the opposite.<\/p>\n

He had been attempting to \u201cmislead\u201d the jury, Murray said.<\/p>\n

The judge warned the jury about how they should consider the defendant\u2019s previous convictions.<\/p>\n

They weren\u2019t to apply it to the reasoning of the facts of this case, to think that \u201cbecause [he\u2019s] convicted of sexual offending against young women… that he must be or is probably guilty of the charges he is now facing\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt would be totally wrong for you to do that,\u201d Judge Geoghegan said.<\/p>\n

But the jury was permitted to consider the convictions when assessing the defendant\u2019s credibility, given his assertion that \u201cthe rumours weren\u2019t true\u201d.<\/p>\n

The jury has retired to consider its verdict.<\/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":"While giving evidence, he claimed he and the girl had consensually kissed and that she only complained he…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":81834,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1554,17704,5767,15036,181,8912,1350,78,51030,185,12517,111,43,139,69,17699,28703,7680,17703,427,1227,1961,54,1455],"class_list":{"0":"post-81833","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-zealand","8":"tag-alleged","9":"tag-assault","10":"tag-convicted","11":"tag-defendant","12":"tag-details","13":"tag-distressing","14":"tag-hears","15":"tag-in","16":"tag-includes","17":"tag-is","18":"tag-jury","19":"tag-new-zealand","20":"tag-news","21":"tag-newzealand","22":"tag-nz","23":"tag-offender","24":"tag-offending","25":"tag-sex","26":"tag-sexual","27":"tag-story","28":"tag-tauranga","29":"tag-this","30":"tag-trial","31":"tag-warning"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81833","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=81833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81833\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/81834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}