Waikato policeman on trial for rape

A high-ranking Waikato policeman is on trial for the alleged rape of a female officer at a party nearly 21 years ago, where the Crown says she was too drunk to stop it.

The 44-year-old man, who has interim name suppression, appeared in the High Court at Hamilton yesterday. The alleged rape happened in the atmosphere of a loud, rowdy party in Rotorua for the woman's birthday, Crown Prosecutor Deborah Davies told the court.

An open invitation was given to staff at the Rotorua police station, where the woman and man both worked.

At the party the woman, so intoxicated as the night went on, had slumped on the ground and at one point fell over a chair and was put to bed by others.

Miss Davies said the woman remembered the man coming into her room. "She was so drunk, she didn't have the ability to stop him. She couldn't move, she couldn't stop him undressing her," Miss Davies said.

Miss Davies said the man had turned up late to the party. She said the woman had no interest in the accused. "She had no idea it was even going to happen until it did." The woman woke the morning after the party and remembered what had happened, Miss Davies said. She told another police officer at work: "I had gone to bed to sleep and [he] came in and shagged me." Miss Davies said the woman never made a complaint about the alleged rape because she was scared she would have to leave the police.

She left the police force as a detective sergeant in 1999 and in 2004 the man she had told was watching something on television. Miss Davies said it was him who reported the alleged rape to police. The woman was contacted and decided to lay a formal complaint.

Miss Davies said when spoken to the accused conceded he had sex with the woman, but she had consented, kissing him when he sat beside her on a couch, before asking him to go to her bedroom. "He appears to have remembered in detail the complainant, yet he could not remember any other police officers or persons at that party at all," Miss Davies said.

The man claimed in the weeks following the encounter he had given the woman a full body massage and when they had met in a police gym years later in the 1990s the woman had gone up and given him a hug.

Defence counsel Philip Morgan, QC, said the jury would have to decide whether the woman consented to sex. He said they would also have to decide whether the accused knew the woman was not consenting.

"Absence of memory should not equate to absence of consent," Mr Morgan said. The trial before Justice Rodney Hansen is expected to last until the end of the week.