Leading cricketer says sex after partying was consensual, not rape
Arguments over whether a 20-year-old woman consented to sexual intercourse are central in the trial of a top cricketer accused of raping her.
Northern Districts player Scott Christopher Kuggeleijn, 24, is on trial in the Hamilton District Court, where he is facing a single charge of raping the woman in her bed, following a night of drinking in Hamilton.
The trial began yesterday with both prosecution and defence outlining their arguments about exactly what happened in the Hamilton East house the woman was living in, in the early hours of May 17 last year.
Crown prosecutor Jacinda Foster recounted the movements of both the alleged victim and Kuggeleijn, detailing how they were drinking at a friend’s party in another house in Hamilton before heading into town, and then back to her house.
The pair had gone to bed and had begun kissing and touching each other. Although she was intoxicated at the time, the woman allegedly made it clear to him she did not want matters to proceed any further. After falling asleep for a time, the pair awoke, and Kuggeleijn then allegedly lay on top of her, holding her arms over the top of her head and raping her.
‘‘She became quite uncomfortable very quickly . . . he would not desist,’’ Foster told the jury of eight men and four women.
‘‘Afterwards she was completely distraught. What the defendant had done was a gross breach of trust.
‘‘The defendant engaged in an act of sexual intercourse . . . when she did not want to. And he knew she did not want to.’’
The prosecution did not take issue with what Kuggeleijn might or might not have hoped would happen, Foster said.
‘‘He was never entitled to assume one act of physical intimacy would lead to another act of physical intimacy . . . an act of sexual intercourse.’’
However Kuggeleijn’s lawyer, Philip Morgan QC, said the jurors would need to consider very carefully what occurred that night.
Kuggeleijn believed completely that the woman had consented to sexual intercourse, he said.
Kuggeleijn is well known in cricketing circles.
He played for Wellington for two seasons, but moved back to Hamilton in 2013, where he grew up.