A man in BDSM relationships with women he met on Tinder has been found guilty of choking a woman to the point of unconsciousness in the shower.
However, he was acquitted on a second charge of choking a different woman while they were on a bed.
A jury in the Wellington District Court, reached its verdicts late on Thursday afternoon, four and a half hours after jurors began deliberating.
The man was charged with strangling the first complainant and injuring with intent to injure the second. The charges differ because strangulation wasn’t introduced as a separate offence until December 2018, after the man met the second complainant.
During the nine-day jury trial jurors heard the man, who has ongoing name suppression, met both of the women on Tinder. All three were active participants in the BDSM, or kink community, and all were involved in the sex industry.
But the Crown told the jury that this wasn’t a case of BDSM gone wrong. Instead, it was alleged he deliberately and intentionally strangled the women until they passed out.
“He wanted sexual gratification, and he just took it,” Crown prosecutor Tim Bain told the jury during his summing up on Wednesday.
The defence case was that the incidents described by the women never happened.
His lawyer, Adam Couchman, asked the jury to consider how someone could roll off a bed while unconscious, or fall in the shower without injury and said the women made up their allegations because of grudges they held against the man.
During his closing Bain told the jury the defence’s assertion didn’t make sense. Between the first complainant giving her first interview to the police to giving her evidence in court, 1440 days had passed. The second complainant had uplifted her entire life and moved across to Australia, from where she gave her evidence.
The defence case is both of them dragged their grudges against the man across thousands of days and thousands of kilometres to come to court, Bain told the jury.
And in doing so they had disclosed intimate and often embarrassing details about themselves to the court, police and lawyers, including graphic photos and details about B&D scenes, sex work, hours of Facebook messages and videos - having their sex lives interrogated again and again and again to perpetuate a lie about what the man had done to them.
“That is not what you saw,” Bain said of the complainants’ testimonies.
But the defence told the jury that what the woman said was too bizarre and unbelievable to be true. “How do you prove something that didn’t happen, didn’t happen? You can’t prove a negative.” Couchman told the jury.
Earlier in the trial the court heard the first complainant matched with the man on Tinder in late 2019. They began a dominant/submissive relationship, and things developed quickly. He set tasks so she could earn time with him, including sex work from which they shared the profits.
They also went into business together forming a company that rented a central city apartment from which they leased space to sex workers and operated sex parties.
In early 2020 the woman was in the shower with the man when, without prior warning, he put his arm around her neck and pulled her back into a choke hold. The pressure made her pass out and she awoke on the shower floor. She said the man seemed unconcerned and didn’t ask if she was okay.
Bain said the man wanted to push the boundary of safe play in ways that he hadn’t done before and knew she wouldn’t agree to.
“He did it without her consent, betting it was easier to ask for forgiveness than permission,” he told the jury.
The defence said the woman came up with the allegations after the pair’s dominant/submissive relationship had ended and the man had moved out of the apartment in June 2020 and signed his shares in their company over to the woman.
Couchman said it was that decision to leave the apartment and the business which prompted the allegations as the woman’s whole sense of financial security went when he left, because his partner and other sex workers also left with him.
“When they left she was in a crisis. How was she going to keep afloat?” he asked.
Couchman said she turned an incident of consensual breath play into an allegation and, after meeting the other complainant in August 2020, the two concocted a story, telling a meeting at the Prostitutes Collective and later the police.
The second complainant met the man on Tinder in 2017 or 2018 and saw him as a possible romantic partner. She was flattered by his interest in her and impressed by his large social media presence.
They collaborated in about half a dozen photo shoots, but Bain said the woman felt he didn’t always respect her boundaries, and she recalled the phrase, “Good girls don’t stop”.
Some time in late 2018, he invited the woman to his house to hang out and spend time together.
There was no photo shoot. They had sex on the bed and, while on top of her, the Crown claimed, he pushed down on the centre of the neck.
This was different to her past experience with choking where someone placed their hands on the side of the neck so as not to impede the person’s breathing, she told the court. He was looking directly at her.
Again, the Crown said he knew exactly what he was doing, focusing on her windpipe. She recalled waking up on the floor but was unsure how she got there. Then they continued to have sex.
But the defence said the woman’s actions months later, when she messaged the man out of the blue, asking to make content with him again, showed the alleged choking incident simply couldn’t have happened.
Couchman told the jury in that text exchange it was clear the woman had ceased contact with the man, not because of anything he had done, but because of the actions of his jealous partner. And that didn’t reconcile with the Crown case.
Summing up to the jury on Thursday, Judge Bruce Davidson said the critical issue in the case was whether the man had choked the two complainants until they were unconscious, without their consent.
Jurors had to be sure the man had intentionally applied pressure to their necks, impeding their breathing, causing them to lose consciousness. And they had to be sure the women hadn’t consented, he said.
In order to find the defendant guilty, the judge reminded the jurors they had to be sure all the elements of the charge had been met and each charge should be considered separately.
After the verdict Judge Davidson convicted the man and remanded him on bail ahead of next month’s sentencing. He also ordered continued suppression of the man’s name.
Catherine Hutton is an Open Justice reporter, based in Wellington. She has worked as a journalist for 20 years, including at the Waikato Times and RNZ. Most recently she was working as a media advisor at the Ministry of Justice.
He spotted the man walking and swerved onto the footpath and hit him.