A man who claims he was sexually abused as a teenager by a teacher who was more than twice his age said their sexual liaisons felt like an out-of-body experience that she controlled.

The man, who was aged 12 or 13 at the time, told a police interviewer the alleged offending mostly took place at the home of the woman, a teacher at his school who also became a family friend.

He said he would babysit her children but wasn’t paid to look after them as it was done as a favour to the woman, a sole parent in her 30s who needed support.

During the interview, he sketched diagrams of the rooms where the alleged offending took place, estimating they’d had sex ten times over that year in the woman’s bed, after showering, and while they were visiting her mother.

Sometimes at weekends, he said he’d stay overnight and she’d move the children into the spare bedroom.

The video statement was recorded ten months before the woman was arrested in late 2023 and played to the Wellington District Court today.

The woman, whose name is suppressed, is on trial before Judge Bill Hastings, where she denies five counts of sexual violation by unlawful sexual connection and two counts of doing an indecent act on a young person.

Her lawyer, Elizabeth Hall, told Judge Hastings the offending never happened and the man wasn’t telling the truth.

What the heck?

In the video interview, the man said he recalls the first time the woman touched him when he was asleep in her bed with her children.

He said she’d come upstairs and got into bed between him and her children and had kissed him.

“I thought, ‘What the heck?’”

He said he recalls the woman removing his underpants and pyjama bottoms and inserting his penis into her vagina.

Several times during the interview, he described the interactions as like an out-of-body experience, where he was present but almost as a viewer.

Unable to express himself, he said he shook like a dog, with her on top of him.

“I can’t say I remember feeling angry or abused. I was just trying to make sense of what was going on”, he told the police.

He said the woman seemed equally stunned, asking him what had just happened and was “like a possum under headlights”.

The man told police the offending came from left field, and there was no sign of anything before that.

But the man said the offending continued throughout the year. Aside from the sexual intercourse, there were allegedly several instances of oral sex and a lot of touching between the two of them.

He explained the offending ceased when the man went to high school, and he didn’t see her again until several years later when he attended her wedding.

While there, he said the woman took him aside and moved her dress to show him a tattoo , telling him it was for him because she’d love him forever.

Over the years, the man said he’d wrestled with the guilt and shame of what happened and said he felt he could have done more, but he didn’t know what to do.

He’d told a girlfriend, his family, his wife, and her family, until finally coming forward to the police in late 2022.

She wouldn’t let a 12-year-old babysit her precious children

Under cross-examination, Hall suggested that the man’s account couldn’t be true because he said it was happening all year, but her client only moved into the address where he said it happened towards the end of the year.

Aside from her children, Hall said the woman’s father also moved into the house to keep them safe from an ex-husband.

The father and his grandchildren had slept in the spare room and during the last school term, it was the father, not the teenager, who’d been primarily responsible for looking after the children after school, she said.

The man said he couldn’t recall.

Hall suggested that the man couldn’t have spent weekends at the house because the woman, her children and her father left Wellington every weekend, to visit a relative who was living out of the capital.

When she put it to the man that the woman would never let a 12-year-old boy babysit her two precious children or stay overnight at her house, the man said she had.

Hall also suggested an incident at the mother’s house never happened, as he’d been given his own room because he had a fever, which differed from what he’d told the police.

And she produced a wedding photograph showing the woman’s tattoo was clearly visible that day, and not a “smoking gun”.

Instead, Hall suggested that the incident had arisen after the man had tried to kiss the woman and was told in no uncertain terms that what he’d done was completely inappropriate.

“The fact of the matter is that you’ve called everyone who loves you and supports you, to tell this story and you are not going to say now that you’ve got it wrong,” Hall suggested to the man.

“No, because I’m not wrong,” the man responded.

Asked by Crown prosecutor Anselm Williams in reexamination if the man recalled meeting the woman’s father, the man said he didn’t.

When it was put to him that there were similarities between him and his wife’s statement, the man said he’d spoken to her over the years and shared some, but not all of, the details.

He also denied that the man had pursued charges as a result of being rebuffed after trying to kiss the woman; the man said that didn’t happen.

And asked directly by Williams if the man’s account of events was a lie, the man said it wasn’t.

The Crown is expected to finish its case tomorrow.

Catherine Hutton is an Open Justice reporter, based in Wellington. She has worked as a journalist for 20 years, including at the Waikato Times and RNZ. Most recently she was working as a media adviser at the Ministry of Justice.