A Donegal woman has told a Central Criminal Court jury that a sergeant accused of raping her in their local Garda station told her "you were great" after the alleged event.
The now 25-year-old woman claimed the rape happened after they left a pub at about 1 a.m. and he offered to get her a lift home in a patrol car.
She also told the jury that he replied: "I know. It was my fault. I'm sorry," when she told him he shouldn't have raped her, while they walked towards his house after the alleged incident. She was "in shock" and crying and kept her eyes away from his face.
He drove her home in his own car. She reached her house at 2.20 a.m. and went straight to bed.
The 55-year-old accused denies raping and sexually assaulting the woman on June 21st, 2000.
The alleged victim said in reply to Ms Deirdre Murphy SC, prosecuting, that she was on leave from work at that time and went to the pub at around 9 p.m. on June 20th because she liked to play pool. She said she drank five pints of Guinness. The accused came in at about 11 p.m. and drank whiskey. By 1 a.m. they were the only two customers on the premises.
The woman said they were refused more drink and when she failed to contact her sister on her phone to come and take her home, the accused said he would try to get a patrol car to bring both of them home.
They went to the Garda station but he failed to get a patrol car for her and she failed to contact her sister. She decided to walk home and moved to get her handbag. The accused was standing at the station counter and made towards her to kiss her. "I said to him: 'don't even think about it'," she told the jury. The woman said the accused repeated his move when she again tried to get her bag and began kissing her and touching her with his hands.
"I just turned away and started panicking. It was going through my head that his son was my friend and this should not be happening," she said. "All I wanted to do was to go home but couldn't because he was standing still facing me and he came on to me again and that was when I froze.
"I was crying and worried if I would be all right or if I would be pregnant from this. He heard me saying this and said 'you were great'. I just wanted to go home," she said.
She said the accused suggested they go to his house to see if his son would drive her home and she walked along but kept her distance from him. She would not face him and kept her eyes to the left looking into the fields.
The accused told her at his house where his son's room was and suggested she wake him to ask for a lift home. The accused got into his own car and she went with him to her own home.
She went to Derry the following afternoon and told a girlfriend about the incident. She was examined by a doctor after she asked for the morning-after pill and later went with her sister to Letterkenny Garda station where she lodged a complaint.
Mr Michael O'Higgins SC, defending, told the complainant that his client would say in evidence that she initiated the sexual activity and that the kissing and touching was all consensual. He told her the accused would claim she put her hand into his underpants to touch his penis and that he ejaculated prematurely which caused her hand to be coated in semen, and that she took off her own trousers and tried to arouse him.
The complainant replied that none of what defence counsel outlined had happened. She had no doubt in her mind the accused raped her but she agreed with Mr O'Higgins that in walking to the accused's house she was leaving the village and going in the opposite direction to her own home.
She agreed the accused had tried in the station "to rustle up" a patrol car to bring them home but she was unaware of a second phone call he made to another person who declined to get out of bed to provide transport.
She couldn't say, in reply to Mr O'Higgins's suggestion, if she was "more keen" on the accused's son than he had been on her but agreed she had been annoyed on one occasion when she found him talking to another girl when he was escorting her at a function and there had also been a later incident between them.
She agreed with counsel that, if she had woken up the accused's son, that the accused would have been "taking a risk" if she was crying and distressed and if his son wanted to know why. "He did it because he is sick," she replied.
The trial continues.