A police officer has denied raping a young woman after a night out, telling a jury: ‘I know what consent is.’
Ben Lister, 36, is accused of dragging the 21-year-old off a sofa while she was asleep before sexually touching her as she drifted in and out of consciousness.
The woman had a child as a result of the alleged rape, with DNA tests later showing evidence Lister was the father.
The West Yorkshire Police Sergeant today gave evidence in his defence after jurors heard how the complainant has been left with ‘nightmares’ over the night out.
Speaking from the witness box at Bradford Crown Court, Lister said: ‘I know what consent is.
‘I don’t recall a conversation in the build up, “can I have sex with you?” It is not a conversation I would have.
‘It’s [consent] in body language, the build up conversation.
‘I wouldn’t just start to have sex with someone.’
Lister was asked by his barrister, Laura Nash, whether the woman had asked him to stop and he said ‘no’.
Ms Nash also asked whether the complainant had indicated she did not want to engage in sexual activity, whether she pushed him away or appeared unwilling to participate.
The defendant said ‘no’ to each question.
The police sergeant told the jury he was newly single at the time of the incident in August 2016, having recently split from his police officer girlfriend Kate because she had been cheating on him.
The couple had been together for three years and Kate had moved into his house with him and his 11-year-old daughter from a previous relationship.
But in summer 2016 Lister found out she was having an affair.
‘She was very insistent that she had not slept with him. I was unsure whether the relationship could continue, there were trust issues,’ Lister said.
‘Kate still wanted to be in a relationship. I needed space, it was not a good time in my life.’
Lister told the jury that on the night out in Halifax, his friends had tried ‘matchmaking’ him with the complainant.
He said everyone was drunk by the time they arrived back at a friend’s house, but ‘no-one was out of it. No-one was falling over. No-one needed to be helped’.
Lister described how after his friends went to sleep, he and the woman began kissing on the couch before they had sex on the floor.
The defendant said he remembered withdrawing before ejaculating as there was ‘giggling between us because of the awkwardness of cleaning up’.
Lister was asked about a later Facebook message from the woman saying ‘did I sleep with you last night?’ and why he replied ‘no’.
The defendant said it was because he wanted to get back with Kate and feared her finding out about the one-night stand.
The court heard Lister learned the complainant had given birth and met her on subsequent nights out with friends.
He said that ‘everything seemed fine’ between them and ‘it never crossed my mind that I was the father’.
He told jurors: ‘I didn’t see how it could’ve been. My recollection of pulling out, for want of a better phrase, I didn’t see how it could be.’
However, he said he accepted he was the father because of the DNA test.
Lister denies one count of rape and one count of assault by penetration.
He said he had been a police officer in West Yorkshire since 2007 and had no previous convictions or misconduct findings against him.
It is the prosecution’s case that the woman did not consent to sexual contact with Lister and ‘for the bulk of it she wasn’t in any fit state to do so because of intoxication’.
Earlier, the court heard from a witness who said the complainant had described Lister as ‘too old for me’ on the night out.
She told the jury that the day after the alleged rape the complainant had texted ‘something happened last night’.
A month later she discovered she was pregnant, and the witness told the jury she’d asked ‘could it be Ben’s’.
The complainant maintained her ex-boyfriend was the child’s father, though the friend said ‘the baby looked nothing like him’.
DNA tests later proved Lister to be the child’s father.
On Tuesday, jurors watched a police video interview in which the woman told an officer she was ‘paralytic’ after the night out and ‘passed out on the couch’ at a friend’s house.
She said she remembered being dragged off the sofa and Lister’s hand being on her chest.
She told police: ‘I don’t remember much after that because I think I blacked out, but I remember seeing his face on top of me.
‘I had nightmares about it. Just his head above me and his hands on my chest.’
She said she tried to push Lister away but felt ‘trapped’ by him.
Afterwards she ‘pretended to be out of it’ until Lister had gone and then she cried herself to sleep.
She later messaged Lister to ask if they’d had intercourse, to which he responded saying they had only engaged in other sexual activity.
Lister only found out about the pregnancy when the woman went to the police in January 2020.
He denied the child could be his, claiming to have withdrawn before ejaculating. He later claimed she had not been asleep, unconscious or too drunk to know what was going on, and that everything that happened between them was consensual.
The woman said although she initially claimed the father of her child was her ex-boyfriend, she knew it must be Lister’s because she had not had sex with anyone else for around a year previously.
She said she ‘saw his face’ whenever she looked at her child.
She denied suggestions by defence barrister Ms Nash that she had engaged in consensual sexual activity with Lister and that she had lied about not being able to remember having sex with him.
Before deciding to press charges, the woman had told a family member she was not sure she could go to the police as she believed they would ‘just take his side’ and ‘look after their own’.
Before the opening of the trial, the judge told jurors not to draw parallels with Sarah Everard’s killer, Wayne Couzens.
He said: ‘There’s no suggestion here that the defendant abused his position as a police officer in order to commit the offence, which he denies.’
The trial continues.
