By Sarah McPhee
A Sydney woman accused of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old boy has told a jury she was “really down” and had been drinking when she kissed the teenager for up to 20 seconds, but denies they then had sex.
The 46-year-old has pleaded not guilty to two counts of aggravated sexual intercourse with a child under 16. Prosecutors allege the woman performed oral sex and had penetrative sex with the boy at a home on the lower north shore on a night in 2021.
A 46-year-old woman leaves the NSW District Court where she is on trial accused of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old boy. She has pleaded not guilty.Credit: James Brickwood
Taking to the witness box at her NSW District Court trial on Friday afternoon, the accused said she had been feeling down and went into the boy’s bedroom as she “just wanted a friendly chat”.
She said the teenager was on his phone, told her he was watching a movie and asked if she was OK.
“I said, ‘I’m just really, really down,’ ” the woman said.
He said the boy told her to “cheer up”. She said she was sitting up at first on the bed, with her legs over the covers.
“I was on one side, and he was on the other … in fairly close proximity to each other but not crowding each other’s space,” she said.
“Sometime later he leant in and kissed me on the neck. We started kissing on the lips.”
Asked by her barrister Phillip Boulten, SC, how long they kissed on the lips, the woman said, “It was short, I’d say approximately no more than 20 seconds or under.”
She said the boy stopped “and said very quietly, ‘I love you.’ ”
“Then I felt his erection on my leg. It felt so awkward and wrong, that I basically, I was out of there.”
She said, “I got up, I stopped it” and left the room quickly, and denied having taken their clothes off.
“He says that you were in that room for hours. Is that true or not?” Boulten asked.
“That is just not true,” the woman replied.
Boulten said: “I want to ask you what on earth were you thinking when you kissed him?”
“ I don’t know,” she replied.
The woman said she had drunk “quite a bit … over one bottle, and up to 1½ bottles” of wine, but denied it was three bottles, and dismissed any suggestion she blacked out or fell asleep in the room.
“What was the state of your memory on the day you woke up, after ... that incident?” Boulten asked.
“I remembered everything, just about,” the woman said.
She said the boy raised the incident four days later, asking if she remembered that they had kissed, and she had replied, “No, we didn’t,” out of fear of being overheard.
More than a year later, the situation was raised by the boy in a phone call recorded by detectives without the accused’s knowledge. It was three weeks after the boy had reported the allegations.
The woman said she was “shocked or confused” and apprehensive, as “it was so in the past”.
Regarding the kiss, she said, “I knew I’d done something wrong.”
The court heard the boy, in the call, said, “Remember we had sex, right?” The woman had replied: “Well, not really … I don’t remember.”
Asked by Boulten why she had said, “well, not really”, the woman said: “Because kissing isn’t sex.”
She said she had been “pacifying and neutralising a very serious threat” and “calming this fabrication or fantasy”.
The woman said she was in disbelief at the “very serious false accusation”.
Boulten, in a brief statement on Friday, said the prosecution has to prove the woman is guilty and she “does not have to prove her innocence”.
Her evidence will continue on Monday at the trial before Judge Sarah Hopkins.
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