A man accused of raping a university student outside a Brisbane cathedral on their first date has described her repeated resistance to his sexual advances via texts beforehand as “playing coy”.
A day after his barrister asked the alleged victim why she wore “sexy lingerie” on the night, Mitchell Cameron Peggie rejected a prosecutor’s claim his account of consensual sex was his own “fictional fantasy”.
Peggie, 26, told the district court on Tuesday their sexual encounter in the yard of St Stephen’s cathedral in August last year was the culmination of flirtatious conversations which began when they met on the dating website Oasis.com.
He said when meeting the woman for a drink at a bar, her revelation that she had worked as an exotic dancer “naturally” led him to steer conversation in a “more sexual” direction.
Peggie, a Gold Coast restaurant worker who intends to resume a law degree, said he discussed his experiences of public sex, group sex and swingers’ clubs with the woman before inviting her to take a “sexy walk around the city”.
He denied allegations she repeatedly tried to stop him groping her on the street before he lead her to the church grounds, pushed her against a stone monument and raped her.
Peggie denied she told him on the way to the churchyard: “I’m not that easy and I’m not the type of girl to have sex on the first date.”
The woman, who alleged the attack took place in full view of a stranger who walked past them in the churchyard, was asked by Peggie’s barrister, Douglas Wilson, on Monday why she did not cry out for help.
She said she “was terrified if I tried to fight back he would have hurt me”, alleging he held her head at one point.
“Just because we discussed public sex and then went for a walk doesn’t mean I gave him consent,” she told the court.
The woman rejected allegations she moaned in pleasure during the encounter, a claim repeated on Tuesday by Peggie, who said she had invited him to “fuck me”.
Peggie said when later asking the woman “how her first public sex experience was … I got a bit of a vibe that maybe she wasn’t as excited about it as I was”.
The prosecutor, Brendan White, asked Peggie whether their conversations via 270 texts leading up to their meeting suggested “implied acceptance” that sex would occur, as contended by his lawyer when questioning the alleged victim.
White cited one of a series of texts before their meeting in which Peggie suggested an explicit sex act, to which the woman replied: “No, I’m not that easy.”
Peggie said he did not take that as lack of interest but that she was “just not being as sexually assertive as I am, she’s just not being as blunt about it as I am, she’s playing coy”.
When he texted her about “fantasising about what I’ll be doing to you tonight”, the woman responded: “Drinks LOL that’s it.”
Peggie said the fact she used the acronym “LOL [laughing out loud]” meant she was not suggesting she was “not comfortable” with.
“I don’t think it’s any secret now that I was very abrupt and very confident about my sexual interests and I definitely put it out there for her to notice and to know that that’s what I was about,” he said.
In one text, Peggie told the woman there were “three good reasons for meeting up tonight: My tongue, my big cock and my four-hour stamina”.
White asked whether the woman’s responses to another suggested sex act (“LOL!!! not tonight!!!”) and a question about lingerie (“You aren’t seeing me naked”) did not make it clear she did not want to have sex.
Peggie said he “didn’t take it from the totality of her text messages that she wasn’t sexually interested in me”.
“From all her responses, she’s still texting me, she still wants to meet up, she’s still flirting with me, she’s still bantering with me,” he said.
When the woman told Peggie in a text before they met that she had been at the hospital until 2am with her sister who was in pain, he said he was “pretty sure this is some sick reference to you masturbating until 2am”.
Peggie said he did this to “introduce a sexual element to the conversation” and seeing if she would “react well” after what he took to be her interest via the dating website.
The trial before judge Deborah Richards continues.
