KEY POINTS:
A woman says suspended police assistant commissioner Clint Rickards was the last person she saw with a set of handcuffs before they were used to chain her to a bedpost while she was sexually violated.
But she also admits being unable to identify him from a photograph taken at the same time in the 1980s.
The woman yesterday told the High Court at Auckland how, when she was 16, Rickards and his former colleagues Brad Shipton and Bob Schollum forced her down on a bed and performed an indecency with a whisky bottle.
The three men deny charges of kidnapping and indecently assaulting her 23 years ago in Rotorua.
The woman said Shipton was straddled over her hips when he pulled some handcuffs out and passed them to Rickards, who was standing on her left. Schollum was to her right.
She remembered her right hand being chained to the post.
"I couldn't tell you if it was Rickards or Mr Schollum who did the handcuffing," she told the court.
She had gone to the house at the invitation of Shipton, with whom she had been having a consensual sexual relationship, and was met by the trio and two others she also believed to be policemen but could not identify.
She was asked by Crown Prosecutor Brent Stanaway if she could have mistaken Rickards, whose defence is that the incident never happened and the woman cannot be believed.
"I have no doubt in my mind whatsoever. I know it was Clint," she said.
She said she was also sure the others involved were Shipton and Schollum, who also say the incident did not happen.
Shipton, then 25, gave her a few drinks of whisky and lemonade and suggested they have sex, to which she said, "Not with all these guys around we're not".
She described how two men scooped her up and carried her off.
"It was like a big joke to them: 'Oh, she is not going to come willingly'."
She fought back by screaming, grabbing on to the door frames and biting. "I remember the comment being made that for such a little thing I was quite a fighter."
She said one of the unidentified men was pacing up and down as though he didn't want to be there and she pleaded unsuccessfully with him to help her.
She did not know what the other unidentified man was doing.
After her attackers chained her to the bed, she said, Shipton told one to get something from the lounge.
She then described how they performed the indecency with what she thought was the whisky bottle they had been drinking from.
"I called them a pack of bastards and said they would pay for what they had done."
Schollum stayed behind after the attack and said she wasn't to tell anyone or "I could suffer more for it and so could my family", which scared her.
She then walked home and did not see the men again, except for a visit from Schollum to ask her out, which she refused.
Asked by Mr Stanaway why she did not complain to police at the time she said: "Who would believe me for starters? I was fighting policemen. I was on my own. I had no back-up and was probably very stupid to go with them."
She said she did not know Louise Nicholas. She also said she had been under a lot of pressure at the time the police investigating that case approached her in 2004 because her relationship was breaking up and she had four children at home.
For Rickards, John Haigh, QC, challenged a number of contradictions in her police statements and previous court appearances.
He asked the woman how - despite Rickards serving as a uniformed officer and being on crutches and in a plaster cast for much of the time during which the alleged incident occurred - she could not recall seeing him incapacitated and only claimed to have seen him in plain clothes.
He told the woman her accumulated inconsistencies showed she simply could not be believed and she was "embellishing, constructing as she went along".
Mr Haigh said her inability to identify Rickards from a photo from the 1980s until a detective pointed him out also showed she could not be believed.
The QC asked why, if she was in a house in suburban Rotorua and she was screaming and screaming as described, "no one told you to be quiet and the neighbours didn't come".
Mr Haigh answered his own question: "Because it didn't happen."
The woman: "Yes, it did."
For Shipton, Bill Nabney said the woman had claimed his client did not have a moustache, but evidence would be given later that he had one from the early 1980s and did not have it removed until the 1990s.
The woman had earlier told the court how she initially found the attention Shipton paid her "neat", and she had fallen in love with him quickly after meeting him at her work, which was frequented by police officers, and at the Cobb & Co bar.
She said their "dates" revolved around sex in the back of his car at Sulphur Pt on Lake Rotorua.
"There was no movies, no dinner."
THE CASE
The accused
* Clinton John Tukutahi Rickards, 46.
* Bradley Keith Shipton, 49.
* Robert Francis Schollum, 54.
The charges
They deny kidnapping a 16-year-old girl and indecently assaulting her with a bottle sometime between November 1983 and August 1984 in Rotorua.
The alleged victim
* Now a 39-year-old mother of four, her claims came to light when detectives were investigating the Louise Nicholas rape allegations.
* The detectives found references to her in one of Shipton's old police notebooks. She made her claims after they approached her, having never made a police complaint before. Her name is suppressed.
The history
Rickards, Shipton and Schollum were acquitted last March of 20 charges, including the rape, sexual violation and indecent assault of Louise Nicholas when she was a teenager in Rotorua in 1985 and 1986.
The trial
Set down for two weeks in the High Court at Auckland before Justice Judith Potter and a jury of eight men and four women.
