Marc Hunter accepts he assaulted a woman he had a relationship with, ending a domestic violence trial in the Tauranga District Court.
Warning: This story deals with details of domestic violence and may be distressing.
A man has admitted causing injuries that turned a woman’s blonde hair “pink with blood”, ending a jury trial in the Tauranga District Court.
This came after the woman he was accused of assaulting told the court she was no longer going to protect him.
Throughout the first day of trial, the woman said she couldn’t remember any of the violence Marc Hunter inflicted.
She accepted, under cross-examination on the first day, that some of her injuries might have been caused by her falling over on gravel, partly intoxicated, following an afternoon at a waterhole.
But today, when defence lawyer Rebekah Webby continued her cross-examination, she referred the woman to messages she’d sent to a police officer at the end of last year.
The woman appeared to tell the police officer things hadn’t been as bad, or violent, as she initially reported.
In response, the woman told Webby that, up until this morning, she’d been doing “all that [she could]” to protect Hunter.
“After reading the article yesterday, I realised I need to protect myself and just say the rest of what I remember.”
The woman was referring to a New Zealand Herald article that provided a summary of the first day’s evidence.
In it the woman said she felt it made it sound like she was a “drunken lady” who falsely blamed everything that happened that day on him.
“Yes, I fell over on the gravel, but you can probably see from those photos [produced as evidence] that does not happen from falling over on gravel.”
The woman went on to describe being dragged from the car, having gravel go up into her lips, as well as receiving punches to her body.
Webby suggested to the woman that she had previously made complaints to police that had been untrue. She suggested the woman would make allegations and then back down, because they’d not been true in the first place.
However, the woman disagreed; she said she’d made accurate complaints but had backed down because she didn’t want Hunter to get arrested.
She also told Webby that she’d left things out of a statement she’d made to a private investigator, hired by the defence, about the trial allegations − again because she’d been trying to protect Hunter.
Partway through the continuing cross-examination, during the court’s morning adjournment, a resolution was reached between the Crown and defence.
The 35-year-old pleaded guilty to four reduced charges related to domestic violence.
They included two charges of wounding with intent to injure.
The Crown case was the woman had been with Hunter and some of his other family members at a waterhole between Thames and Paeroa.
When they went to leave there had been an argument, and the woman had been pushed from the moving car and then beaten.
In her opening address, Crown prosecutor Molly Tutton-Harris told the jury this was the first of two “serious assaults” that led to the woman’s normally blonde hair turning “pink with blood”.
The woman got back into the car but as they drove past police, who were responding to an incident, she had tried to alert them.
The woman’s evidence was that as she was leaning out of the car window to get their attention, someone in the car had opened the door and she’d been “hanging on” trying not to fall out.
When the car did stop, she was dragged out, and she said was again beaten by Hunter, and perhaps someone else in the car, before the car drove off, leaving her on the side of the road.
Hunter initially denied all the violence but has now accepted responsibility.
The charges were reduced in terms of what his intent was when he wounded her to an intent to injure, rather than to cause grievous bodily harm.
A charge of threatening to do grievous bodily harm will be withdrawn at sentencing.
Hunter has been remanded in custody and will be sentenced in April.
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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