A man put his hand up a woman's skirt and implied she was "asking for it" because of her clothing, the woman says. He is charged with eight counts of indecent assault against four complainants between and , and one count of male assaults female in Three of the complainants gave evidence on Tuesday. The first three indecent assault charges relate to the first complainant, who told the court she had been at home in Invercargill when the man turned up at her house unannounced.
She was wearing a short tunic dress, which she would not normally have worn in public without tights, but she had not been expecting visitors, she said. As she bent over to put something in the rubbish bin, the man put his hand up the woman's skirt and grabbed at her, she said. I asked what the hell he thought he was doing. The man laughed and said it was an "open invitation" or "advertising", the woman told the court.
The woman gave evidence of another occasion when the man had put his hand down the back of her jeans at her home, and multiple other occasions when he had displayed "inappropriate behaviour" when she visited his home. The man's lawyer John Westgate, when questioning the woman, said she was making it up. Westgate asked the woman why she allowed the man into her house a second time, and why she continued to go to his house, when he had supposedly assaulted her. The woman said she did not feel threatened by the man, but that his behaviour was "a dirty, perverted move on his part".
It wasn't something worth calling police about I thought I'd made the boundaries clear," she told the court. Another complainant who gave evidence on Tuesday told the court she was about 24 years old when the man allegedly indecently assaulted her in She lived and worked in Wellington, as did the man.
The pair went on a trip to the South Island to do some maintenance on the man's property in Lumsden, the woman told the court. During their trip they stayed at a motel in Queenstown. When they checked in, the woman discovered there was only one double bed in the single room. Despite her asking the man to organise for another bed, he did not, she told the court.
