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Allegations of Abuse
in NZ |
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Tea Ropati - League Star accused
of rape |
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Stuff NZPA
ACCUSED: Tea Ropati has denied six
charges of attempted sexual violation. A jury is to decide today whether he
is guilty or not of the charges. Picture: David White/Sunday Star
Times A jury is expected to today retire to decide if former
Kiwis and Warriors rugby league player Tea Ropati is guilty of raping a woman
he met in an Auckland bar. Ropati has denied six charges of attempted sexual
violation, sexual violation, rape, and sodomy, that allegedly occurred on
June 15, 2006, after he met a woman in the Whiskey Bar in suburban Ponsonby. The prosecution argued Ropati took advantage of the woman's
drunkenness to sexually assault her in the bar, then rape her in a car in
nearby Victoria Park. In his summing up yesterday Crown prosecutor Phil Hamlin
agreed the woman had been flirting and laughing with Ropati in the bar. She later became sleepy and unresponsive when the pair
moved to a back room where some of the alleged sexual offending took place,
he said. The law was clear that consent could not be given if
someone was asleep or unconscious, he said. The woman was so impaired she was not able to consent to
sex and all the evidence presented in court pointed to consent not being
given, he said. Her next memory was of being in Ropati's car with his
"angry face" looming over her. Medical injuries to her genitals showed blunt force trauma
which was not consistent with consensual sex, Mr Hamlin said. The defence will sum up today, before the judge addresses
the jurors who will then retire to consider their verdicts. Defence counsel Gary Gotlieb today asked the jury to
consider how Ropati would have known that the woman was in the state of
intoxication. Ropati would not have been aware that the woman had been
drinking elsewhere for six hours before the pair met, he said. Ropati had not plied her with alcohol in the bar. He pointed to the testimony of one of her friends that she
was "stringing her sentences perfectly okay" and to the fact that
the bar person was happy to continue serving her. Evidence showed the woman, who was 36 at the time of the
alleged offences, was someone who knew what she wanted, Mr Gotlieb said. She was not a teenager, but "an in-your-face young
middle-aged person who knows her own mind". "This is a woman who knows how to look after
herself," he said. "She's a big girl and she's embarrassed about what
happened." (Proceeding) |
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