A MAN accused of a three-in-a bed sex assault was found not guilty by a jury.
The man, in his 20s, denied one count of sexually assaulting a woman who invited him back to her apartment and allowed him to sleep alongside her and her female friend in her bed after they met on a night out.
The three were studying in Limerick at the time, the man’s three-day trial at Limerick Circuit Criminal Court heard, in front of a jury of eight women and four men.
The man told Gardaí he was “shocked” when he heard the allegation after his arrest following the alleged assault five years ago.
The woman alleged the man used one of her hands to masturbate himself while she was asleep next to him and another woman in a shared student apartment.
Earlier on the night, the two women went to a pub where they met the man and all three went back to the alleged victim’s home in the early hours of February 15, 2020.
The alleged injured party said she cooked them a meal and the three slept beside one another in her double bed.
The woman told the court that she warned the man on the night she would hit him “in the balls” if he tried anything of a sexual nature with her, after he sought a kiss from her in the bed.
The man, in Garda interviews, admitted asking the woman for a kiss “in a jovial way”, maintaining he had not pursued it after she turned him down.
The accused refuted the woman’s claims she told him she would hit him if he tried anything of a sexual nature.
He told Gardaí that he and the two women were “cuddling” in the bed, “singing songs” and “chatting” before falling asleep.
When Gardaí put to him the woman’s claims that he used one of her hands to masturbate himself in the bed, he replied: “I totally deny it, it didn’t happen at all.”
The man said he accepted that while he may have told the other woman that he fancied the alleged victim, he maintained he did not sexually assault her.
Investigating Garda Ryan Hill, Listowel Station (formerly of Henry Street Garda Station), agreed with the accused’s barrister, Amy Nix, that the accused “had no previous convictions”, was from “a decent, upstanding, hard-working family”, and that he is in gainful employment.
Garda Hill agreed that despite having the right to remain silent during Garda interviews, the man “cooperated at all times with the Garda investigation”.
The alleged victim told the trial that a three-in-a-bed scene was not unusual in the college environment, as students were “going in and out of apartments all the time and it was normal for people to crash and sleep wherever they could get a bed”.
The alleged victim told prosecuting barrister John O’Sullivan that she did not invite sexual contact or give the man the impression she was interested in any type of sexual contact. In fact, she said, she warned him against it.
She said she warned the accused she would defend herself physically if he tried anything of a sexual nature. “That was me setting the boundary and the tone that I was only there to sleep,” she told the court.
She agreed that after alleging the man had become “touchy feely” and looked for a kiss, she left the room to take a phone call and returned to the bed and eventually fell asleep next to the man with his arm underneath her.
She alleged she later woke up in the bed to find him “moving my right hand up and down on his penis”.
She said she “froze” and went into another bedroom that had been left vacant by another student.
Two weeks later she made a statement of criminal complaint of alleged sexual assault.
After deliberating for one hour and 38 minutes, the jury reached a unanimous verdict, finding the man “not guilty”.
