A young woman who was allegedly raped by the footballer Ched Evans in a hotel room was due to give evidence at his retrial on Wednesday.
Cardiff crown court has heard that a friend of Evans “hooked” the 19-year-old waitress when she was heavily intoxicated and went with her in a taxi to the hotel in the early hours of 30 May 2011.
Evans, who has played for Manchester City, Sheffield United and Norwich, arrived at the hotel soon after and allegedly raped the woman before leaving via a fire exit.
She woke up next day bruised and in pain but had been so “out of it” that she did not know she had been in the same room as the footballer, it is alleged.
Simon Medland, prosecuting, told jurors they would be shown video of the alleged victim describing what she remembered of the night.
She will watch the video at the same time as jurors from another part of the court and will then be brought into the room to answer questions from behind a curtain.
In his opening speech on Tuesday, Medland told the jury that the woman believed the drinks she had consumed while in the same bar as Evans earlier that night had been spiked. But he said the prosecution was not suggesting that Evans had spiked her drinks.
Medland argued that the woman could not possibly have consented to sex because of her intoxicated state.
He said: “We submit that she was that intoxicated – for whatever reason – that she didn’t really know what on earth was happening and that what the facts of this case show is that she was raped by this young footballer in that room, not that she had consensual sex with him.
“It is not a proper description, we suggest, to say that he had sex with [her]; it is more accurate perhaps to say to that he ‘did’ sex to her. Sex without consent is rape.”
Medland said the woman would tell the jury she did not consent, adding: “How could she? There is good reason to conclude, we submit, that she didn’t even know Ched Evans was having sex with her. She had to piece together some fairly fragmentary memories of events later the next morning … long after this defendant had slipped away into the night through the fire escape door.”
Evans, 27, denies rape.
On Tuesday, the jury of six men and six women heard how earlier in the evening, Evans, then 22, and a friend, Clayton McDonald, had been in the same bar as the woman in the north Wales seaside town of Rhyl.
The woman ended up at a kebab shop, where she fell over, collided with a delivery car, and dropped and left her handbag. She was with McDonald.
“He had managed to hook the intoxicated, stumbling [woman]”, said Medland. “They got into a taxi and the taxi driver formed the view that [she] was ‘drunk, very docile and not with it’.
From the taxi, McDonald, who made a phone call to someone saying: “I’ve got a girl”. The prosecution alleges he was speaking to Evans.
McDonald, the woman and Evans ended up in the same hotel room, where the alleged rape took place.
Jurors were told that Evans and McDonald have already stood trial. Evans was convicted and McDonald was found not guilty. Evans successfully appealed against his conviction and is being retried.
The jury has been ordered by the judge, Mrs Justice Nicola Davies, not to research the case online or to look at any social media surrounding it.
