Rape accused told Dublin trial he believed sex was consensual

This report is a localnews.ie summary based on public court reporting and records; sources are listed below.

A man who cannot be named for legal reasons told a Central Criminal Court jury he believed sex with a woman he met on the dating app Badoo was consensual. The proceedings were reported on 15 May 2018.

He pleaded not guilty to raping the woman at her Dublin home on 14 August 2015. The complainant alleged that he raped her and stole her phone as he left.

The man told his counsel, Blaise O’Carroll SC, that he and the complainant had agreed to meet for sex. He said she seemed disappointed when he arrived without a condom, but there was no negative response when sexual activity began.

He accepted that he told a garda, “I know she said no, but we’d already started”. He said he was referring to her saying no to finger penetration and performing oral sex on him, and that he stopped those acts when she asked. He denied the statement meant he had continued after she said no.

Prosecuting counsel Conor Devally SC put it to him that he had accepted in garda interviews that the woman said no to penetrative sex. The man described the interviews as a vigorous, “one-sided” process and said he had been at the station for nearly 24 hours.

Garda Rossa Smith said a phone seller’s contact number matched the accused’s number in the complainant’s WhatsApp contacts. He said the contact details remained after she reinstalled the app on a new phone, but their messages no longer existed.

The trial had reached its closing stages before Mr Justice Patrick McCarthy and a jury.