“Whereas the defence case is that he was saying, ‘How could you say these things about me when they didn’t happen?’”
Tegus is on trial, where he denies 17 charges, including rape, sexual violation by unlawful sexual connection, indecent assault and making an intimate visual recording.
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Opening the Crown’s case this week, prosecutor Michaela Waite-Harvey told the court Tegus was physically and sexually violent towards the woman, twice filming her while they had sex without her knowledge.
He’s also alleged to have raped her, as well as forcing her to have oral sex and physically assaulting her.
Waite-Harvey said the woman confided to her mother and later spoke to police. As a result, Tegus was arrested, and a protection order was issued.
Tegus’ actions following his arrest are the basis of two charges of perverting the course of justice and breaching a protection order.
The Crown says he pressured the woman to withdraw or amend her complaint, urging her to say she’d lied to the police or that her mother had forced her to make the false allegations.
It’s alleged he even got the woman to send a letter in her own name retracting her testimony. In return, he allegedly promised to take her overseas once the court case was over.
And despite the protection order, the Crown alleges they met twice in person. Online, he allegedly created false Instagram profiles so she could contact him, deleting them periodically to avoid detection.
The Crown says she was told to message him at certain times of the day, and she’d set an alarm on her phone, reminding her to log into Instagram. If she didn’t message, he’d get angry.
It’s also alleged he demanded she take photos of herself in the shower and send them to him, and he’d check what she was wearing before she left the house, ordering her to change her clothes if he thought her outfit was inappropriate.
‘I own you now’
In the woman’s video statement to police, which the jury began watching today, the woman described how Tegus allegedly put her hand on her throat, leaving a purple bruise.
The next day, he asked her to send him a photo of the bruise.
He thought that was like cool and like he was proud of himself that he did that to my neck, she said.
He said, “It’s like I own you now because I left my mark on you.”
During the interview, she described several instances of being raped, telling the interviewer she’d told him to stop while they were having sex, but he didn’t.
Defence: the victim’s reliability and credibility at issue
However, in a brief opening statement to the jury, Bamford suggested that while they may find the charges distasteful and abhorrent, they should set those feelings aside.
He told the jury this was a case where the woman’s reliability and credibility was going to be squarely at issue and urged them to keep an open mind.
Bamford suggested to the jury that the allegation that Tegus put his hand to her throat may have been an innocent incident that had morphed into an assault allegation.
In regards to the sexual offending, he said the key issue was whether the woman had consented to certain sexual activity.
He told the jury it was clear from the many messages the pair exchanged that they both had an interest in sex, but also that the woman was trying to do what he wanted in order to make things good for Tegus.
As a result, the woman had consented to things, even if she found them painful, he said. But he told the jury that his client was clear: if the woman said she didn’t want the sexual activity to continue, he’d respect that and stop.
The trial before Judge Noel Sainsbury is expected to take up to two weeks.
Catherine Hutton is an Open Justice reporter, based in Wellington. She has worked as a journalist at the Waikato Times and RNZ. Most recently she was working as a media adviser at the Ministry of Justice.
