A rape complainant is not a “loose and immoral woman” who had sex with a stranger in an isolated beach bunker, but a vulnerable victim attacked by a man who had portrayed himself as her saviour.

That was the picture painted by Senior Crown counsel Paula Tyndale yesterday as she urged a jury to convict the defendant.

The woman has alleged that the accused man, a friend of her fiancée, lured her from her home last year and raped her in the bunker at Horseshoe Beach.

She has given evidence to Supreme Court that he persuaded her to come with him by claiming she was in danger from her fiancée — who had previously been violent toward her — if she remained at the home they shared.

The woman, a non-Bermudian aged in her 40s, said she went with the defendant in the belief he would help her escape to her home country. Instead, she claimed, he put her in a taxi and took her to the bunker where he raped her.

Neither the woman, Ms A, nor the accused man can be identified for legal reasons. The defendant has pleaded not guilty to sexual assault and gave evidence in his own defence yesterday. He repeated claims on the witness stand that he had originally made in a Police statement after his arrest — that the woman agreed to having sex.

He told the jury: “At no time did I threaten this lady. At no time did she make it known to me that she wasn’t consenting to sex, and at no time was it made known from her that she didn’t want to have sex with me. It was consensual sex.”

During her cross-examination of the defendant, Ms Tyndale put it to him: “You’re not speaking the truth about the whole series of events that took place that day... at no time while you were in the company of (the complainant) did she indicate that she was willing to have sex with you.”

However, the accused man denied that was the case.

In her closing speech to the jury, Ms Tyndale said that although the woman did not physically fight off the defendant, she made it clear verbally that she did not want to have sex with him. Ms Tyndale asked the jury to accept the woman’s evidence that she did not fight because she was frightened of the “very physical and very muscular” man and no one knew where she was. She did not fight back, said Ms Tyndale, “so she could live to tell the tale.”

Rejecting claims from the defendant that the woman voluntarily had sex despite not previously knowing him, Ms Tyndale said: “This was not the kind of loose and immoral woman the defendant makes her out to be.”

She told the jury the circumstances the victim found herself in the isolated bunker when the defendant asked for sex deprived her of the ability to fight, because she was scared for her security.

However, in his closing speech defence lawyer Charles Richardson reminded the jurors they would have to be satisfied so they were sure that the woman did not consent to sex — or that his client did not care if she did — before it could convict him.

“The evidence could never make you sure,” he urged. “In this case, there is nothing that the complainant did or said that was sufficient to convey that she was not consenting.”

Puisne Judge Carlisle Greaves is set to sum up the evidence heard during the three-day trial this morning, before sending the four men and eight women of the jury out to consider their verdicts.