(Editor’s Note: Contains graphic detail)
A West Kelowna man on trial for a 2016 rape testified in his own defence this week and claimed that his accuser was a playful participant in consensual sex.
Jeremy Czechowski told the court that the woman entered the West Kelowna home where he was staying Feb. 20 2016 with a mutual acquaintance, and while he could see she was intoxicated he couldn’t assess to what degree. She just looked like she wanted to have some “fun.”
“She jumped in my lap within a moment of being there,” he told Crown prosecutor Angela Ross, upon cross examination.
Ross asked if that behaviour shocked him.
“No… people act like that nowadays, it’s a different time,” Czechowski said.
Ross asked Czechowski if he could see his accuser’s legs, neck and chest at that point.
He said he did.
She asked if there was bruising and cuts on those areas, as was witnessed by doctors and police in the hours following their encounter.
Czechowski said he could not see evidence of injuries of that nature.
Ross then asked if he saw cuts and scrapes on her hands or fingers, as was also detailed in medical reports. All but one of her gel nails had also been peeled back.
Czechowski said he did not notice these issues.
Czechowski’s accuser told the court earlier in the trial that Czechowski had torn off her underwear and taunted her with them within minutes of meeting.
Czechowski said he remembered they ripped off very easily and that he didn’t taunt her with them. He merely pulled them off, and then threw them to a friend and his accuser asked for them back, in a “laughing, giggling manner.”
Shortly thereafter, he said, his accuser joined him upstairs.
“You never spoke to her before, and within minutes you tore off her underwear and asked her to go upstairs?” Ross asked.
Czechowski said their mutual friend must have given “a good impression of him.”
He added that it wasn’t unusual behaviour, and he’s had a lot of people act in the same manner.
When his accuser testified, she told the court she had been confined in the room by Czechowski and that she didn’t want to have sex with him and said she told him as much.
Czechowski told the court that he obtained verbal consent for the act.
“You said she was sexually aggressive from the minute you met, straddling you, running upstairs with you … I suggested you never asked to have sex,” said Ross.
“I did ask,” said Czechowski.
Ross asked about holding the woman’s arms down and choking her.
Czechowski said that “it’s something people do during sex” and that she could have removed herself from the situation.
Afterward sex, Czechowski called her “irrational” when he said she took his purse and wouldn’t give it back, and called for his friend.
“What were you doing when you were trying to get her to calm down, aside from going to get your friend to come in?” Ross asked.
Czechowski said he was trying to talk to her. “No one was trying to rip it off of her… he went to pick up the purse to take it.”
He said when his friend went to take the purse back, she attacked him.
Ross asked if Czechowski was concerned about her state. “I was concerned about everything. I was also concerned with my stuff that she was trying to leave with,” he said.
“You didn’t try to stop your friend from grabbing a woman who was hysterical?” said Ross.
“It just happened so quickly, she attacked him and he threw her back,” Czechowski said.
The accuser then fled from the house.
Walking outside, Czechowski said he looked for her, but didn’t find her.
She eventually came back to the house, where Czechowski said they proceeded to have anal sex after a conversation.
“After a few minutes of being in what you described as being in a psychosis or something, you took her back upstairs for sex?” Ross said.
“There was a conversation yes, then we went upstairs,” he said. She had calmed down and was “back to being her normal bubbly self.”
The defence case is scheduled to continue.
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