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Allegations
of Sexual Abuse |
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Defence lawyers have
grilled Louise Nicholas about fabricating abuse as a way of dealing with a
sexual history she was ashamed of. She was asked to
explain how counselling in the early 1990s had filled "black holes"
in her memory and why a former flatmate remembers her as being friendly and
having sex with the men accused of raping her. Assistant police
commissioner Clinton Rickards and former Rotorua policemen Bradley Shipton
and Robert Schollum are on trial in the High Court at Auckland for raping and
sexually assaulting Mrs Nicholas, then aged 18, in 1985 and 1986. The
allegations relate to her being raped by Rickards and Shipton at her Corlett
St flat over several months and to an incident at a Rutland St house, where
she says she was forced to have group sex and was sexually assaulted with a
police baton. Mrs Nicholas spent most
of the trial's third day under cross-examination by the three defence
lawyers, John Haigh QC, Bill Nabney and Paul Mabey. The court was told her
former flatmate would give evidence that she was in the house when Mrs
Nicholas had willing sex with one of the accused, probably Robert Schollum.
Mrs Nicholas saw several counsellors in the early 1990s and had given
different abuse accounts to
professionals over the past 20 years, the lawyers say. Mrs Nicholas also
alleged she was raped or indecently assaulted by four other Murupara
policemen, "Sooty Smith", Kelvin Powell, Trevor Clayton, and a fourth
man who was charged and acquitted at trial. Mrs Nicholas had been accused at
that man's trial of lying to a schoolteacher by saying she was once raped by
"five Maoris on horseback", the court was told yesterday. Mr Haigh, Rickard's
lawyer, spent a long time questioning Mrs Nicholas as to why she had not
sought help or fled from the "appalling" abuse and had gone to the
Rutland St house with Schollum "like a lamb to slaughter". "I didn't run, I
admit that," Mrs Nicholas said, adding she had felt powerless. Confronted with the
flatmate's recollections, Mrs Nicholas repeatedly said she did not dispute
that was what the flatmate remembered. "I can only say it didn't involve
me", and the flatmate had never been home when abuse occurred. Asked about doctors'
and counsellors' notes from the 1990s which only referred to abuse in
Murupara, she said she did not go into detail on those occasions but told her
family and police about the Corlett St and Rutland St abuse in 1993. Mr Mabey, Schollum's
lawyer, cited a 2001 report from a Tauranga doctor supporting an ACC claim,
which said Mrs Nicholas had been picked up by a carload of policemen in
uniform, and taken to her Corlett St flat, where she was handcuffed, raped
and assaulted with a baton. Mrs Nicholas yesterday said she'd never seen the
report and the doctor had "got it all twisted and wrong". The court was told
Rickards had said for a decade that he had only two sexual encounters with
Mrs Nicholas – a threesome with Shipton, and oral sex at her flat. Shipton said they had
sex several times. Schollum maintained there had been a sexual relationship
till 1987. "There was never
consensual sex with those men anywhere," Mrs Nicholas said. |
