A JURY has heard how a woman allegedly raped as she slept by a stranger in a central Carlisle flat woke and told him: “You need to stop. That’s wrong.”
Jurors at the city’s crown court watched an interview the female gave to police after an alleged incident on the morning of January 1 this year.
She told how she’d gone into Carlisle to celebrate New Year’s Eve, having drinks with friends before things became “hazy”.
She couldn’t remember getting home. Waking next morning, she saw Joseph Mjemer, 36, – whom she’d never met before – standing fully clothed near her. She fell asleep again and woke a second time to find him “naked” next to her.
“I panicked. I pushed him off. I said what are you doing? You need to stop. That’s wrong,” she told police.
Mjemer, she said, asked what she was talking about and became “aggressive”.
“This is rape,” she said she told him. “It’s not OK.”
As Mjemer left – and before police were swiftly called – the woman alleged he said: “It’s my word against yours.”
Asked during the interview why she was making a complaint, she replied: “I was assaulted, sexually, by someone I don’t know.”
Mjemer, of Elizabeth Street, Glasgow, is on trial. He denies two charges alleging rape, and is said to dispute there was any sexual activity at all.
Opening the case, prosecutor Adam Lodge had said to jurors: “It is your task to listen to the evidence, to weigh up the evidence, fairly on all sides, and decide what the facts of this case are.”
The trial continues.
