A restaurant worker raped a university student outside Brisbane’s Catholic cathedral just days after he beat charges of sexually assaulting a teenager.
Mitchell Cameron Peggie, 26, was found guilty by a district court jury on Friday of raping the student outside St Stephen’s cathedral after meeting her for a drink in August last year.
The attack came five days after Peggie was found not guilty in another district court trial involving a 17-year-old girl, who had accused him of groping her genitals and biting her on the Gold Coast in 2014.
The student, 21, who described being spun around and raped against the cathedral wall after being too scared to call for help from a passerby, wept as the jury read out two guilty verdicts of rape and one of sexual assault.
Judge Deborah Richards, who said the attack was especially “humiliating” given its public setting, sentenced Peggie to seven years in jail.
Peggie made first contact with his victim on dating site Oasis.com, where he used the profile name “Mr Remarkable”.
They met for a drink a day later at the Gresham hotel after she gave him her number and he bombarded her with sexual advances during an exchange of 270 texts.
Peggie conceded during cross-examination that the student had repeatedly told him in texts that sex was not on the cards that night but he thought she was “playing coy”.
The student agreed she had been flirtatious in texts and while talking on their date, which included Peggie’s discussion of his experiences of public sex, group sex and swingers bars, and her disclosure she had worked as a stripper.
But she had been clear right up to and during the encounters in the church yard that she did not want sex, batting away his hands and telling him: “I’m not that easy and I’m not the type of girl to have sex on the first date.”
Peggie’s account of consensual sex was “fictional fantasy”, the prosecutor Brendan White said.
The student had told the court that when a stranger walked past her and Peggie in the cathedral yard, she did not call out for help for fear of how her 1.88m-tall attacker would react.
She said she agreed to masturbate Peggie in an attempt to placate him before he raped her.
Peggie told the court that when later asking the student 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 guilty verdicts against Peggie on Friday came beside not-guilty findings on one further count of rape and two of sexual assault.
As he was led from the dock, Peggie waved to his mother Bronwyn, who supported him throughout the trial.
Last year, the pair were photographed by the Courier-Mail smiling hand in hand after a jury found Peggie not guilty of sexually assaulting a teenager he had met for coffee at a Gold Coast train station.
The teenager alleged the attack took place in the car park at midday as people walked nearby.
She panicked as Peggie, who she had met once before, pinned her wrists behind her head, bit her on the neck, then grabbed her breasts and vagina.
She told the court this was despite her “struggling violently. I said, ‘Stop it.’”
Peggie had told police of the incident: “I did pin her wrists [but] not in a forcible ‘I was trying to molest her’ way. She makes it out like I was trying to rape her, and that was not at all the case.”
He claimed the reason she refused to kiss him on the lips was “because she was doing the whole tease thing”.
Peggie, a restaurant supervisor who told the court he wished to resume a law degree he had begun, will be eligible for parole from 25 January 2020.
