A woman has detailed a graphic account of physical and sexual abuse she says she suffered at the hands of her ex-boyfriend.
Photo: RNZ / Dan Cook
The man, who has interim name suppression, is on trial before Justice Brewer in the High Court at Auckland this week.
The defendant is accused of subjecting the woman to escalating physical and sexual violence during a brief relationship that began in 2016.
He has pleaded not guilty to two charges of sexual violation by unlawful sexual connection, three charges of male assaults female, two of assault with a weapon and one of threatening to kill.
In a DVD interview played in court today, the woman told police the violence began almost as soon as the relationship had started.
"The first time he hit me we were having an argument and he just slapped me across the face. I've been in an abusive relationship before so I vowed to myself that I would never get back into one.
"So this was just like, I'm in it now. This is scary. I can't escape. I've just put a lease down on this place, moved in, how the **** am I supposed to get away."
The woman said things escalated quickly and though she told her mother about the violence, she felt it was safer to stay and keep him close than leave him.
She described being slapped and pushed during fights and said the man sometimes took a knife to her throat.
"We had these two big butcher knives and whenever he got angry, like I said the Jekyll and Hyde, something inside of him snapped.
"He would go straight to the kitchen, get one of those knives and hold it to my throat."
The woman said she felt like she was walking on eggshells around the defendant and broke down describing his anger during their relationship.
"I could never understand why he got so angry towards me. I just loved him and I just wanted him to love me like I loved him."
The woman told the court she had a fighting spirit and fought back at the start but eventually lost the will to resist the violence.
She said the man tried to kill her one night in 2017; chasing her around the house before holding her in a choke hold and forcing her to perform sexual acts on him.
"I just looked at him and I said, 'Please don't make me do this, please don't make me do this'.
"I was crying and he said to me, 'If you don't do this I will kill you and I will kill your family and you know I will'."
The woman told the interviewer she felt so embarrassed about what had happened she hadn't told a soul.
She left the relationship roughly six months after it began; getting a protection order and making a formal complaint at a local police station the day she moved out.
In her opening address, Crown prosecutor Fiona Culliney said the abuse wasn't just physical and sexual but financial too.
She said the man took more than $10,000 from the woman during the course of their relationship through rent payments and direct bank transfers.
"Through this financial dependance by the defendant [the woman] felt trapped in the relationship and unable to leave.
"[The woman] had paid for household furniture and whiteware, making it difficult for her to end the relationship earlier than she did."
In a brief opening statement, the man's defence lawyer Belinda Sellars QC told the court her client categorically denies the offending.
"[My client] accepts that it was a difficult relationship but he utterly rejects he was physically or sexually abusive in any way."
The judge-alone trial before Justice Brewer is set down for two days.