A high profile Sydney man allegedly asked his intern to catalogue sex tapes of himself and his ex-wife moments before he allegedly raped her, a court has heard.
The woman, who was 19 at the time she was allegedly raped, appeared before the NSW Downing Centre district court on Wednesday, in the second day of a trial expected to last 10 weeks. She said the footage was “incredibly explicit sexual intercourse”.
“I was watching the man who I was employed by, for free, having sex with his ex-wife,” the woman, known as complainant one, told the court.
The man, whom Guardian Australia cannot name due to a suppression order, is facing trial after pleading not guilty to 12 charges – which include six counts of rape – alleged to have occurred over a six-year period against six women on separate occasions.
The crown is arguing the man had a tendency to carry out sexual conduct with usually much younger females, knowing they did not consent or was reckless to their consent.
The man’s defence contends that there was sex with five of the women who have alleged they were raped, including complainant one. However, they argue the sex was consensual, “not in the circumstances alleged by the crown”, and that the complainants “admired the accused, even idolised him”.
The woman told the court she was completing a month-long internship at the man’s house in the mid-2010s.
On the fourth day of the internship, the woman alleged the man made an offer for her to stay at his home.
“The plan was for me to sleep in the living room on a mattress,” she said.
On the day she would have spent her first night there, the woman alleges she was asked to catalogue the sex tapes. She alleges that shortly after, the man asked her to look at a movie he was watching – unrelated to the sex tapes – inside his room, and asked her to sit on the bed with him.
She told the court she laid on the bed and alleged he then began making sexual advances, which she refused, and he proceeded to rape her.
“I believe the accused took his pants off and pulled my underwear to the side and got on top of me, basically forced himself on top of me,” she said, adding that he ejaculated after about a minute and did not use a condom.
“I just still to this day can’t really describe that emptiness that I felt in that moment,” she told the court.
Earlier that day, the woman told the court there “was talk” of her going with him to an industry event that evening. But after the alleged rape he told her she had to stay at his home.
When he returned, she alleges he was doing drugs with a friend. She said she then left to stay with a friend and a few days later cut the internship short.
Under cross-examination, the defence counsel for the man, David Scully SC, put to the woman that she was never asked to catalogue sex tapes and asserted that he had in fact tasked her with finding images and videos that might be suitable for a documentary about his life.
“I could only wish that was what happened,” she responded, and later told the court she believed she was asked to catalogue the sex tapes as “a grooming exercise by the accused”.
She told the court under cross-examination that she had, in part, decided to accept the man’s offer to stay at his house because she was not comfortable at her other accommodation. Under cross-examination, she said she returned to where she lived on a plane with the man, who also paid for the flight.
The woman said she had subsequent contact with the man on a number of occasions in the years after the internship, and she told the court he would reach out whenever they were in the same city.
About “four or five” months after the alleged rape, when the man was visiting the city where she lived, she told the court he invited her to visit his studio, where she alleged he raped her again. This incident does not form part of the charges against the man.
“I said, ‘I have my period and I don’t want to have sex with you’,” she told the court. She said she went to a medical centre for an examination in the hours after the incident.
The nature of the woman and man’s ongoing relations and contact was cross-examined by Scully. Asked about the tone of the contact between her and the man after the two alleged sexual assaults, she agreed she had deleted some messages between them and agreed some of their exchanges were friendly and others “might have been” hostile.
The woman said she didn’t come to terms with the fact that what had happened to her was rape until about three years later and that she then told her partner what had happened.
“[I] had never really spoken to anyone about what had happened … I’d never really admitted to myself what had happened,” she had earlier told the court under questioning by the crown.
Asked by Scully why she hadn’t earlier accepted it as rape, she said: “[The] reality is this is a very complex situation where someone had put me in a position of admiring them while [I was] simultaneously trying to understand something had happened to me when I was … 19.”
The trial continues. The witness remains on the stand, under cross-examination from defence counsel.
