A 25-year-old Canberra man went on trial on Monday in the ACT Supreme Court over the alleged rape of a 19-year-old woman after they met outside Cube nightclub in Civic.
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Kerry Roy Bye has been charged with four counts of rape, two of sexual assault in the second degree, one count of committing an indecent act and one of unlawful confinement.
The eight alleged offences relate to one woman and a single incident, in the early hours of the Friday morning, on November 13, 2015.
The woman, then 19, and her friends had been on a night out in Civic. They had drunk Jägermeister from a plastic bottle in the car trip into the city, and had gone to Molly, Uni Bar, Academy, McDonald's and finally Cube, the court heard. By early morning Friday, at Cube, the woman was "very, very drunk".
How would you rate your level of intoxication? prosecutor Jane Campbell asked the woman.
"Definitely an 8 or 9.
"I definitely wasn't seeing straight, I couldn't see very clearly at all. I was losing my balance a bit."
The woman, who gave evidence via a remote witness room, said she had vomited in the bushes outside the club.
"There was a man who started talking to me," she said. "I remember him calling me sweetheart."
She had at one point texted her friend "thumb on head", code for when someone was making them uncomfortable, she said.
The woman said she did not remember getting into a car or taxi, but recalled being in a car with a man and someone else driving, and the car pulling over for her to vomit on to the street.
She described how, once inside a unit, the man had started taking off her clothes, and she remembered helping him pull off her boots.
"I thought I was getting ready to go to bed," she said.
The woman told the court she had tried to hit the man in the groin, had tried to leave the room but was blocked by the man, and she had tried to swing a bedside table drawer at him.
The Crown alleges that the man raped her, at one point choking her and pulling her hair, before the woman escaped and was found naked, save for her socks, at the Cook shops carpark.
The woman told the court her throat hurt for weeks afterwards, and she had found it difficult to speak and swallow.
"Did you know the name of the man that had assaulted you?" Ms Campbell asked the woman.
"Not at that point," she said.
"At one point I asked him what his name was.
"He said it was Joe."
Before the woman gave evidence, defence barrister Ken Archer asked the jury not to pre-judge, and instead wait to hear all the evidence before making up their minds on the guilt of the accused.
"There's more to the story that's been outlined to you in the Crown's opening," he said.
Mr Archer said the woman's recollection of the events that night was unreliable, and he flagged a lengthy cross-examination of her evidence.
The trial continues before Justice John Burns.
