The defendant met the first accuser in 2015, when the accuser was 16 and trying to increase his own profile. They became close friends and messages between the two shared with jurors showed flirtatious exchanges. The influencer, who was in his late 20s but admitted lying about his age, was accused of having twice spiked the teen's drinks during nights out together.
On both occasions, the teen said, he awoke at the defendant's house, where he was being abused without consent. On multiple other occasions, the accuser told jurors, the influencer threatened to ruin his reputation or leak naked photos of him if he didn't allow the man to perform a sexual act on him.
The second accuser said he was 18 years old when he twice woke up in the defendant's bed after nights of heavy drinking to find the defendant performing a sex act on him.
Taking the witness stand on his own behalf this week, the defendant said he was heartbroken and in shock to learn of the allegations against him. He disagreed that he tried to "groom" the 16-year-old, calling the teen a liar.
Prosecutors, however, pointed to multiple messages in which the defendant pressured the teen for a nude photo, and messages in which the teen explicitly said he wasn't interested in men. At one point, the teen sent a shirtless photo.
"That made you unsatisfied, didn't it?" Teppett asked the defendant.
"Well it's a tease - that's for sure," he responded. "No one likes anyone who teases them."
After another photo that wasn't fully nude, the influencer responded to the teen: "Just take it and be done with it and I won't ask again".
"He was kind of stringing me along," the defendant explained on the witness stand. "That was kind of our relationship. He was still experimenting with his sexuality.
"Back and forth, back and forth. That's just unfortunately how the relationship was."
The defendant testified that he didn't think about age. He disagreed with prosecutors that there was a power imbalance because of his age and his success in an industry the teen also wanted a part of. If anything, he said, it was the teen who was "street smart" and "wanted to get ahead".
"We had an emotional connection, you know?" he said. "I was attracted to his personality as well."
During closing arguments today, defence lawyer Susan Gray pointed out that the age of consent in New Zealand is 16.
"This is a court of law - it's not a court of morals," she said.
She urged jurors to look at the credibility and the reliability of the witnesses.
"You can have drunken consent and you can also have regret," she said.
Gray also pointed to expert testimony about intoxication, including blackouts and "confabulation" - the unconscious filling of memory gaps, which tends to be self-serving and in line with one's sense of identity.
"He may believe he was sexually assaulted, but that's not the beginning and the end of the matter," she said of the second accuser, suggesting he gave consent while extremely intoxicated but had a blackout - then confabulated being raped to fit his own self-identity of being heterosexual. "Clearly [he] has significant memory lapses."
Prosecutors acknowledged both teens continued to spend time with the defendant even after the alleged assaults, which they described as human nature given the power imbalance. They also acknowledged both teens at times acted flirtatious with the defendant, even though both said they were not gay.
"Flirting with someone is not an invitation to [let someone perform sex acts on] you while you're asleep," Teppett said. "The word 'no' didn't comprehend in his brain.
"What he did was not consensual."
