The alleged victim of a rape at the Renegades Clubhouse was painted as drunk, sexually permissive, and untruthful when she told the court about the events of one summer night last year.
The woman, now 20, can't be identified due to a publication ban. Her alleged assaulter, Joey Lamont Arrance, 32, was a junior member of the Renegades Motorcycle Club at the time. The time in question was late July 21 and early July 22, 2010 during a small party at the club's house.
During cross-examination on Tuesday, Arrance's lawyer, Patricia Connor, picked at the details of the initial story the victim told court the day before. Points of chronological discrepancy and the omission of self-deprecating details were of particular interest to Connor.
"Your memory is pretty sketchy and that was not aided by the amount you had to drink...I'm going to suggest you have a selective memory," Connor said. "You've suggested you were on the receiving end of everything but I am going to suggest you were more sexually aggressive."
She also posed that the victim wasn't even interested in pressing a charge until the police presented her with the opportunity.
"At first I wasn't willing to, but when I thought longer that an injustice had been done, I decided I would," the victim said.
"Who told you to use the word injustice?," Connor said.
"No one," the victim retorted, "I'm quite intelligent and I like vocabulary."
When Arrance himself was able to take the stand later on Tuesday he described a much different sequence of events than the one testified to by the victim. She claimed he had made several verbal and one physical attempt to stimulate sex between the two, only to be rebuffed repeatedly by her, then outside on a picnic table he took advantage of his relative sobriety and body weight to force sex upon her. She became quite upset and got him to stop, then convinced her unwitting friend inside the house to take her home, she testified.
"Those are false accusations on her behalf," Arrance said on more than one occasion as Connor put each detail of the allegations to him. He insisted she had been a willing participant in make-out sessions and graphic foreplay inside the party and had agreed to sex when he asked her. Her only condition, he said, was the use of a condom, which he did not possess but obtained from her friend. They went out to the picnic table under mutual agreement that sex would happen there.
"Two minutes in she said 'hang on.' I stopped and said 'what's up?' And she said 'I can't do this, I love my boyfriend too much'," Arrance said. He added that there was no struggle, no screams or upset words, but her mood quickly degenerated into crying over thoughts of her boyfriend finding out.
"To me she seemed upset about what had happened - what she had done," he said.
He added that she was probably crying more because he thought she slipped on the front steps and hurt herself while she waited outside for her friend to take her home.
"I told them to come inside so the cops wouldn't roll by and put in a complaint again," he said.
It will be Arrance's turn for cross-examination today by Crown prosecutor Lana Vizsolyi, who rested her side of the proceedings on Tuesday after calling only the victim to the stand.
