A student has claimed she was raped and sexually assaulted by one of her peers after her last Leaving Certificate examination in 1995.
A 21-year-old Co Sligo man has pleaded not guilty at the Central Criminal Court to two charges of rape and sexual assault on July 3rd, 1995.
The woman, now 22, told Mr Denis Vaughan Buckley SC, prosecuting, she was celebrating the end of the examinations with four male friends at a nearby pub and afterwards they offered to walk her home.
She said "the lads" insisted she get home but she was "messing" with them and pretended to get away and jump in a nearby river.
The woman claimed the accused man and a friend approached her and the accused asked her to walk with him. She did and he put his arm around her.
She put her arm around him and did not feel at all threatened by him but felt "tipsy" after consuming most of a naggin of whiskey.
She claimed the accused man pulled her by the hand into a garden and made out that they were playing a game and that they should hide in the bushes so their friends would not find them.
She said they both crouched down on the pretence of hiding and he kissed her with "force" and "aggression".
He then pinned one of her arms to the ground and tried to get her to hold his penis, but she did not want to and panicked.
She said that while lying among the thorns and brambles he put his fingers in her vagina and tried to spread her legs with his. He got on top of her and put his hand over her mouth and as she tried to scream he penetrated her.
"I though he was going to suffocate me," she said. She claimed he then offered her £100 and told her to "shut up, bitch". The woman then claimed he stopped raping and said: "The lads would kill me if they knew what I was doing."
He then raped her again. She said two friends heard her muffled scream and ran to the scene where she lay with her panties around her ankles.
"He hurt me, he hurt me," was all she could say, and she explained to the court how it took her friends five minutes to coax her out of the bushes. She said the accused man then ran back to the scene and denied the incident to his friends. He called her "a slut" and "a whore" and threw money at her feet.
A friend then took her home on his motorcycle and she chose not to tell her family what had happened.
The alleged victim told defence counsel, Mr Barry White SC, that she had never spoken to the accused in her life and only knew him by his reputation and criminal history. She claimed he had assaulted her older brother the night before the incident. The trial continues before Mr Justice Smith.