Defence makes case in taxi rape case

A young woman accusing a Limerick taxi driver of rape has agreed she could not “retrieve the situation” once a friend had called gardaí about the alleged incident against her wishes.

The 21-year-old complainant agreed when defence counsel, Mr Conor Devally SC, put it to her that “there wasn’t one point where you may have said to gardaí: ‘I don’t know (what happened)’” once her friend had called gardaí for her.

He put it to her that she could not “retrieve the situation” after making “three or four statements set in train by a friend calling the guards, you having said you were raped and not wanting to call them, and being put in a pickle”.

The woman agreed she had not wanted to report the alleged incident.

Mr Devally suggested to her that had his client removed his trousers, as was her evidence, then she would have been able to describe a “large bandage” on the man’s thigh.

Mr Devally put it to her that the passenger seat, which she said “must have been pushed back” before the rape, is “bolted upright to the floor” in that model of vehicle.

He put it to her that her memory was “unreliable” and “much of it impossible”.

He said it was his client’s case that the complainant named the secluded location, asked him to pull the taxi over, had then initiated sex with him lying by his side in the driver’s seat.

The accused has pleaded not guilty at the Central Criminal Court to two counts of rape and sexual assault after picking the woman up in his cab a short distance from a nightclub in the early hours of October 17, 2007

Mr Devally suggested that his client gave the complainant oral sex twice, once before and after he entered her “briefly”, because he had difficulty sustaining erection.

The complainant agreed that she first mentioned the man giving her oral sex in her second garda statement almost a month after the alleged incident.

She agreed that at the time she was new to socialising with alcohol and that she had a difficulty coping with it, it made her behave “out of character” and that it affected her memory.

Mr Devally suggested that on that particular night after the club, she was “very bubbly” in the taxi, “utterly unlike how we see you today”.

He suggested that she only noticed the taxi driver’s wedding band as she was sobering up at the end of the return journey and that she then said: “You’re married, you b**tard.”

Mr Devally put it to her that she had texted her friend about not knowing the source of scrapes on her back after a medical examination organised by investigating gardaí.

Mr Devally asked her why she did not tell this to the doctor as she was being examined. The complainant replied that she did not know.

The trial continues before Mr Justice Patrick McCarthy and a jury of eight men and four women.