RSE workers from Vanuatu, Willie Tankon (left) and Jonathan Lumu, are charged with the rape and sexual violation of a woman.
Warning: This story deals with details of alleged sexual violence, which some readers may find upsetting.
A woman has recalled the moment she says she escaped out the window of a property where she’d been allegedly held, and raped by two seasonal workers.
“I got out, and I ran,” she said in a police evidential video played in Tauranga District Court.
The woman claimed the two men, whose names she did not know, raped her in turn in separate rooms of a property housing seasonal workers.
The Crown alleged those men were Vanuatu nationals Jonathan Lumu and Willie Tokon Tankon, who worked in a kiwifruit packhouse near Tauranga.
They are now defending charges of rape and sexual violation in a trial that began today.
In the evidential video, the woman described an interaction with one of the men.
“I kept saying it’s too big, stop, get off me,” she said.
She alleged the man said: “You want me to keep going, you like this, you like this big d***”.
The Crown claimed the woman and Lumu struck up a rapport during an evening when a group of workers decided to have a night off and drink together at some of the workers’ shared accommodation.
The woman and Lumu had been getting along and agreed to retreat into one of the bedrooms. There they lay down on a mattress and began kissing.
While this had been consensual, the Crown alleged Lumu then took things further than the woman wanted and sexually violated her.
“She told him to stop, however he continued,” Crown prosecutor Richard Jenson said, in his opening address.
He then raped her, as she repeatedly told him to stop – yelling and fighting to get him off her, Jenson alleged.
“Eventually she managed to get him off.”
The woman tried to find her clothing and cellphone after Lumu left.
She was aware there were a number of Vanuatu nationals outside the door.
As she attempted to leave she was allegedly “bundled into” the neighbouring room.
“She began to yell for help,” Jenson said.
The room was dark, with lights turned off, as she was “forced on to a mattress by another male who she didn’t know”.
During both alleged rapes, she had been trying to get the men off her, calling for help, and attempting to leave.
Jenson said the woman was crying throughout the ordeal, and while it was still happening, another man had entered the room and pulled the man off her.
She found her clothing, escaped the room through a window and tracked down her friends.
The Crown said DNA evidence would show Tankon and Lumu had sex with her that night, and the question for the jury would likely be one of consent.
Tankon’s lawyer John Wayne Howell said the jury should keep an open mind about the fact Tankon had initially denied, when spoken to by police, that he’d had sex with the woman.
Tankon now agreed they had sex, but said it was consensual; Lumu says the same.
They both deny violating her.
Regarding Tankon’s initial denial of sexual contact, Howell said there were several reasons why someone might lie to police, especially when they were from overseas and English was not their first language.
He said Tankon hadn’t had any experience with police in New Zealand, and his first interaction was being lined up with 19 others, given a number, in what may have felt like a “firing line”, and made to stand there as a police officer drove past slowly in a car.
Tankon’s previous understanding of law enforcement was a “justice system ... that may not necessarily treat people fairly or play by the rules”.
Lumu’s lawyer Marcus Zintl said the jury would need to assess the complainant’s “credibility and reliability”.
He said it would become apparent she had been “inconsistent” in her account, and suggested that sometimes people do things under the influence of alcohol they later regret.
Consent given, but later regretted, was still consent, he said.
He would ask the jury to consider if they could rely on her evidence to convict his client of “serious charges with life-changing consequences”.
The jury trial before Judge Melinda Mason is expected to take about six days.
Hannah Bartlett is a Tauranga-based Open Justice reporter at NZME. She previously covered court and local government for the Nelson Mail, and before that was a radio reporter at Newstalk ZB.
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