Navy captain ‘raped cadet, 18 then said she’d asked for it’
THE captain of a Royal Navy patrol ship repeatedly raped a teenage cadet when she was extremely drunk, a court martial heard yesterday.
Lieutenant Rhys Christie, 28, ‘pounced on the vulnerability’ of the officer cadet then told her she had been ‘asking for it’, it was alleged.
He was branded a predator after he allegedly exploited the young woman in his hotel room after two Navy nights out.
The 18- year- old – who was bought drinks by Christie – was so drunk on the first night that she vomited on a pub table.
She said she had no memory of events until she woke up ‘confused’ and naked in Christie’s bed.
He is then alleged to have told her: ‘You were asking for it.’
The court martial was told that Christie’s colleagues had tried to get the drunk teenager back to the ship ‘for her own safety’ but he insisted on taking her to his room.
Christie, then commanding officer of Edinburgh-based HMS Archer and now serving on nuclear submarine HMS Vengeance, abused his position of authority, prosecutor William Peters said.
Mr Peters said the girl was raped during separate nights out in Scotland and in Kent.
Christie is accused of five counts of rape over the course of the two incidents, the second of which occurred three days before the girl’s 19th birthday.
The hearing at Bulford Military Court in Wiltshire was told that the two had been in a group watching international rugby at a pub in Eyemouth, Berwickshire.
‘The pair were sat next to each other and he started playing with her leg, footsies, making her feel uncomfortable,’ Mr Peters said.
‘She got very drunk. Due to her drunkenness, she was sick all over the floor and table. While she was sitting there she was drifting off to sleep. Too drunk, the prosecution say, to have the capacity to choose to have sex with Christie in his hotel room that night.
‘She has no memory of being drunk in the pub and has a hazy recollection of walking up the stairs at the hotel and then nothing until the morning. She has no memory of [the sex]. We know it happened because Christie said that it did.
‘She was too drunk to choose to have sex with the defendant and that would have been obvious to him. He was a predator.’
There was an ‘age and rank disparity’, he said. Around three weeks later, when the cadet was ‘extremely drunk’ and ‘staggering’, Christie allegedly raped her in Ramsgate, Kent. The victim, who cannot be named for legal reasons, said of the first incident: ‘I don’t remember being drunk in the pub as such, I can remember drinking but after the shots I don’t remember anything.’
She recalled how she drifted in and out of sleep but was alarmed to discover she was naked so covered herself with bed sheets.
‘He said I was all over him and that I had been asking for it. I was just confused,’ she said.
She woke up confused in Christie’s hotel bed for a second time weeks later, having been ‘extremely drunk’ the night before, she said.
Christie denies the victim’s claims the sex was not consensual.
The pair had consensual sex between the two alleged offences but the woman’s consent then was not a blanket consent, Mr Peters said. The trial continues.
‘She was too drunk to consent’