Jury to begin deliberating on indecency case

A story a Whanganui teenager wrote about being sexually abused was nothing but a piece of fiction, a defence lawyer says.

The girl is one of two complainants in the trial for Wytse De Vries in the Whanganui District Court, which started on Monday last week.

De Vries faces a charge of touching the girl's breast when she was aged 12-16, as well as sexually violating the other girl twice and kissing her indecently.

He pleaded guilty in 2014 to a representative charge of indecently touching the second girl's breast on a number of occasions.

De Vries admits to touching the girl's crotch on at least six different occasions, usually when she was asleep. But he denies the touching went so far as to be sexual violation.

In a closing address to the jury of five men and seven women, defence lawyer Fergus Steedman spoke of the story the first girl wrote in a letter to her mother, which was based on her life and the people in it. The story speaks of 'Mr Sniff' - De Vries - touching her.

Mr Steedman pointed to a diary entry where the girl spoke about loving to make up romance stories about boys she liked, and she said "after doing it for so long it's hard to stop".

"My argument to you is that when she wrote about [the alleged abuse] it was always a fantasy."

He pointed to different parts of the story which he said were inconsistent with how the girl would act in real life.

He said she "developed an instant dislike of him from what appeared to be a gut level", yet wrote in the story about being angry Mr Sniff would show more love to the other girl than to her.

Mr Steedman called the girl an "expert in door-slamming and carefully calculated rudeness".

He also said De Vries never kissed the second complainant in an indecent way, and suggested the girl had it wrong when she claimed to have pretended to be asleep as De Vries kissed her on the lips for two hours.

"Is that credible?" He asked the jury.

Mr Steedman also believed the church De Vries and the complainants attended became "intensively involved" in the matter and "muddied the water", interfering with the evidence gathering process.

Crown prosecutor Harry Mallalieu said both complainants were reliable witnesses.

"It's hard to imagine two young women who could be more honest and reliable," he said in his closing.

He said the first girl heard De Vries kissing the second girl "53 times" as the other girl slept.

"She knows who Wytse De Vries is and she knows what he is," Mr Mallalieu said, describing the complainant as "unfaltering" in her evidence.

He said De Vries had an "obsession" with young girls' breasts, and used the second girl as an object for his own sexual gratification.

"Her evidence in absolutely compelling. To suggest that she could be mistaken about something like that, about these incidents, because she was sheltered or naive and didn't know what was happening to her, is simply nonsense."

Judge David Cameron summed up the case and sent the jury home. They will begin deliberating on Tuesday morning.