Accused: Nicola wanted rough sex

The man accused of strangling Nicola Furlong said the DCU student had demanded “rough sex” and “moaned” when he pressed her neck.

Musician Richard Hinds, from Memphis, Tennessee, also claimed police had pressured him into making a false statement.

For much of the hearing Mr Hinds, aged 19, referred to Ms Furlong as “Nicki”, presumably to indicate a level of familiarity that the two had built up over their brief three-hour encounter.

Judge Ashizawa requested he refrain from using the “nickname” following a request from the deceased’s parents, Andrew and Angela Furlong, who were sitting across from the defendant.

Nonetheless, Mr Hinds continued to use the name, occasionally apologising for doing so. This was despite evidence last week showing that when the hotel duty manager had found Ms Furlong on Mr Hinds’s floor and asked if he knew her name, he said he did not.

Mr Hinds said he put “light pressure” on Ms Furlong’s neck for no longer than 30 seconds as she lay on the floor of his hotel room, adding there had been “no resistance” from the Wexford woman.

The duration of two to three minutes that appeared in his statement made after his arrest had been coerced by police after his arrest, he said. “I remember the police trying to influence me to say I must have pressed her neck for a long time.”

Mr Hinds recounted the events of the night on May 23 last year when he and a friend, James Blackston, had taken an unconscious Ms Furlong and her friend to their hotel after drinking with them in a Tokyo bar.

The women had become so incapacitated at the Scramble bar where the foursome had gone drinking that they had to be put in wheelchairs in order to be transported to the two men’s rooms, said Mr Hinds.

With the aid of a hotel employee, he had lifted Ms Furlong onto one of his room’s two beds, he said.

When she woke some time later, Ms Furlong had asked “what’s up?” before instigating sex, Mr Hinds told Tokyo District Court.

“I remember her grabbing my right arm with her right hand and pulling it toward her upper body,” said Mr Hinds, adding that he was at first “confused” by what she was doing. “When I realised she was pulling my arm [toward her neck], it triggered in my mind that she must like rough sex.”

Mr Hinds said that within minutes of first meeting the two men following a Nicki Minaj concert in Tokyo, the two women had expressed a desire to stay in their hotel.

The women had met the men at a station near the concert venue, and when Mr Blackston, a dancer from LA, asked them if the wanted to stay at the hotel, Mr Hinds “clearly remembered” Ms Furlong’s friend saying “don’t ask, just let us come”. Ms Furlong agreed with her friend, he said.

Ms Furlong’s friend testified last week that the two women had made it clear they were not interested in going to the hotel.

According to Mr Hinds, however, neither showed any sign of declining the offer. The women invited the men to “come party” with them, saying they would drink the men “under the table”.

At the bar, they had danced and drunk tequila together, split into couples, and “touched” in a sexually suggestive manner, he said.

The sexually explicit conversation between the two men about being able to sexually assault the women because of their “fucked up” state was “just meaningless” talk that was “ironic… slang” and normal among members of his community.

He also said he did not know about the sexual assault that Mr Blackston allegedly carried out on Ms Furlong’s friend in the taxi.