A FORMER restaurant owner stripped a woman naked and threw water over her during an alleged rape, the Royal Court has heard.
Gavin Neil Roberts (44) is on trial for assaulting one woman twice, while he faces one charge of grave and criminal assault, one of rape and two of sexual penetration without consent against another woman.
Mr Roberts has pleaded guilty to two further charges of grave and criminal assault against the second woman, who has been giving evidence in the Royal Court for the past two days.
She previously described how, in another incident, he had attacked her, pinned her against walls and a window, thrown her around a room and raped her, over the course of an assault that lasted from the middle of the night until daylight.
Yesterday, the jury was read texts the alleged victim had exchanged with the defendant and with her friends after the alleged rape.
She had written to one friend: “I literally don’t want to look at him knowing what he did.”
She described some of the alleged attack to a friend, saying: “He threw water over me, left me naked on the floor, stripped me.”
She said: “I felt quite unwell.
“I didn’t know what to do; I was alone.”
Following the incident, she sent pictures of bruising to her chin, face and body to her friends, the court heard. She described how he tried to convince her that her bruises had come from falling into the lift and that someone else had raped her.
Crown Advocate Matthew Maletroit, prosecuting, described the two attacks to which Mr Roberts had pleaded guilty.
He “used his hands to strangle her to the point that she struggled to breathe and vomited in her mouth”, he said.
The jury were shown video from those attacks.
She said she took the images because she thought “that was going to be it and I was going to be dead”, adding: “I just wanted people to know that I tried to fight.”
Advocate David Steenson, defending, questioned the timeline of events presented by the alleged victim.
He asked her about texts she had written in “gobbledygook”.
She explained: “I was pretending to be drunk to Gavin.”
Advocate Steenson put to the alleged victim that the alleged attack in town did not happen, pointing out that it was not visible on the CCTV footage shown in court.
Advocate Steenson said: “I suggest to you that that is a lie.”
She responded: “What? That did happen.
“He punched me repeatedly, swearing at me and he went back and forth to do it again.”
The Bailiff, Sir Timothy Le Cocq, is presiding.
The trial is scheduled to last another three days.
