A WOMAN told a court she was sexually assaulted by a man while she, the man, and one of her friends slept beside one another following a night out.
The alleged victim told the opening day of the man’s trial that she woke up to find the man using one of her hands to masturbate himself after the three had fallen asleep in the woman’s bed at her then student accommodation on February 15, 2020.
The woman’s female friend told the court she and the accused had consensually kissed one another in the alleged victim’s bed prior to the alleged assault, but they had agreed to leave it at that and remain friends.
All three were students at the time and the two women met the man while out socialising at a pub in Limerick earlier on the night.
The alleged victim told Limerick Circuit Court that she and her friend invited the accused back to her apartment where she cooked them a meal before they all went to sleep in her double bed.
She said this was not unusual in a college environment where students were “going in and out of apartments all of the time and it was normal for people to crash and sleep wherever they could get a bed”.
She told prosecuting barrister John O’Sullivan that she did not invite sexual contact or give the man the impression that she was interested in any type of sexual contact on the night.
The alleged victim said that when all three got into her bed, she was wearing jogging pants and a t-shirt, her friend was wearing pyjamas, and the man was wearing his underpants and a t-shirt.
She said the man was positioned in between herself and her friend and that the three of them were singing and chatting before her friend fell asleep.
The alleged victim said the accused started to become “touchy feely” and beckoned her for a kiss, which she said she rebuked.
“I told him, ‘if you try that again, I will hit you in the balls’. That was me setting the boundary and the tone that I was only there to sleep,” the alleged victim told the court.
She said that, after rebuking the accused, she left the bedroom to take a phone call but returned and eventually fell asleep on the man’s arm, which she said was laid out across her side of the bed.
She claimed she woke up later on to find the man “moving my right hand up and down on his penis”.
She said she “froze for what felt like a few moments” before leaving the bedroom and going into another bedroom that had been left vacant by another student who was away.
She said that, later on that morning, she politely told the other woman and the accused that they needed to leave the apartment as she had to get ready to attend a doctor’s appointment.
She said that after attending the GP clinic, she contacted another female friend and told her about what the accused had allegedly done to her.
This other woman gave evidence in court that the alleged victim told her that the accused “put his hands in her trousers and she told him she’d hit him in the balls”.
The witness told the court: “She told me that when she woke up, he was touching himself and giving himself a hand-job.”
The alleged victim earlier told Mr O’Sullivan she had felt “quite sober” by the time she got to her apartment after the pub on the night.
“As a college student you ended up drinking every week so, there’s a level of (alcohol) resistance, and by the time I got home, I felt quite sober.”
The accused denies one count of sexual assault and is not expected to give any evidence.
The trial continued on Wednesday.
