A couple's road trip that turned sour after a night crossing of Cook Strait has ended with him being found guilty of rape and kidnapping his former partner. Photo / 123RF
WARNING: This story deals with sexual harm and may be upsetting
A man has been found guilty of raping his sleeping partner and kidnapping her during a later road trip.
The 30-year-old who came to New Zealand on a working holiday from Malaysia in March 2020 remained impassive when the unanimous verdict was given in the Nelson District Court today by the jury panel of eight women and four men.
Name suppression for the man lapsed but NZME has elected not to name him, to protect the victim’s suppression rights.
The man has been in custody for just over a year awaiting trial on the charges that stemmed from a series of incidents dating back to July 2021, and after he twice breached a protection order by contacting her when he was on bail.
He has been remanded back in custody until sentencing in January on the two charges for which he was found guilty today, plus other charges which arose within the context of the offending and for which he has already been convicted after earlier pleading guilty.
The Crown succeeded in proving that the woman did not consent to having sex when they were together on the morning of July 1, 2021, which led to the charge of rape, and that on a later road trip, she had been detained in a car against her will, leading to the charge of kidnapping.
A second charge of rape was dismissed during the trial, due to a lack of clarity around consent and the defendant’s reasonable belief in consent in circumstances where Judge Jo Rielly did not consider it was safe for the jury to consider a verdict.
The defence focused on the man’s view that the woman consented to sexual activity within the relationship they had at the time, and that he neither detained her nor intended for her to be confined.
The man’s lawyer Lee Lee Heah said he arrived from Malaysia in March 2020 on a working visa. In April of the following year, he met and then “fell in love” with the complainant.
The woman had come to New Zealand from China and was in temporary, casual employment when they met while living in shared accommodation on a North Island orchard.
By mid-2021 the pair were living in the Tasman region having moved from the North Island for seasonal work. They had rented a room in a house in which the owner and another person lived briefly.
The rape occurred on the morning the woman was due to go to a job interview in Nelson. The man said he had taken the day off work to drive her there, but she was still “sleepy” so he woke her “in a romantic way”.
The woman said she had not consented to having sex with the defendant at the time in question and had tried to push him away.
On other occasions, she hadn’t wanted sex with him but allowed it out of duty.
The man was surprised and confused by her comments.
Heah said that given the nature of their relationship, he had reasonable grounds to assume she was consenting on that morning.
“There’d been no other occasions of forced sex, so it doesn’t make sense for him to suddenly switch from being a considerate lover to forcing himself on her,” Heah said.
Crown prosecutor Ian Murray described the complainant as a truthful and reliable witness who “accurately described” a sexual assault by her partner.
“She did not consent to intercourse and was asleep when it began.”
Afterwards, the man moved back to a job in the central North Island while the woman remained in the Nelson region, where she then met someone else but remained in contact with the defendant.
She agreed to his invitation to travel north to see him for his birthday but laid down certain ground rules before they embarked on a road trip south.
In November 2021 the man booked a cabin on the Cook Strait ferry from Wellington to Picton and while she slept, he gained access to her phone where he discovered evidence of what was described in court as her affair with someone else.
“He had a fantasy of this loving trip, steamrolled by as soon as she’s asleep he’s snooping through her phone,” Murray said.
The action led to a charge on August 8 last year of dishonestly accessing a computer system, for which he has been convicted after pleading guilty earlier. The rape charge linked to the incident when they were living together in July 2021 was laid at the same time.
After the ferry crossing the couple drove to Kaikōura but argued about what the man had found on her phone.
The next day a planned whale-watching trip was cancelled due to weather, so the man began to drive south towards Christchurch, when the woman had wanted to return to Nelson.
He was about 10 kilometres down the road when the woman realised where they were headed, began yelling and called the police from the car.
The man then turned around and was pulled over by the police who had tracked the vehicle from the woman’s cellphone signal.
Murray said the defendant had been ruminating on their breakup and determined that the woman couldn’t be with the other man, so drove the other way from where she wanted to go.
“Had she not made the call it’s doubtful he would have turned around. It was a deliberate intention to take her where she didn’t want to go,” Murray said.
The defence argued that the man did not intentionally detain or confine the woman, but it had been a spur-of-the-moment decision to drive on to Christchurch.
“It was irrational, impulsive,” Heah said.
In February 2022 the woman complained to the police about what had happened and the man was issued with a temporary protection order that included conditions that he not contact the woman.
He has since pleaded guilty to two charges of breaching a protection order in September last year and attempting to pervert the course of justice by contacting the woman and asking her to withdraw her complaint.
Bail was revoked and he was remanded in custody on September 16 last year, followed by the kidnapping charge laid on December 8 last year.
He is to be sentenced on all charges on January 12 next year.
Tracy Neal is a Nelson-based Open Justice reporter at NZME. She was previously RNZ’s regional reporter in Nelson-Marlborough and has covered general news, including court and local government for the Nelson Mail.
The 19-year-old disappeared without her wallet or mobile phone.