An Auckland businessman who made a rape "confession" online has been found not guilty.
The jury at the Dunedin District Court reached its unanimous acquittals on the two rape charges against 27-year-old Mubeen Abdul Sharif after just a couple of hours of deliberation yesterday.
When the defendant was released from the dock he broke down in tears and embraced supporters in the public gallery.
The verdicts came nearly two years after Sharif posted on social media platform Snapchat that he had raped the Dunedin complainant.
"Things in life are often not as simple as they first appear and so it is with this so-called confession," counsel Marc Corlett KC said.
The post was a result of Sharif’s misunderstanding of the law and was simply him parroting the complainant’s accusation, he said.
The defendant came to Dunedin to see the student in October 2022 and, while in her bedroom, intimacy ensued.
Sharif said he stopped when the woman requested him to and then another consensual attempt also caused her discomfort, effectively ending things.
The complainant told the court the man had ignored repeated requests to cease and had forcibly raped her immediately after the first episode, dragging her towards him by her ankles.
Crown prosecutor Craig Power called the woman "a fair, credible, reliable, honest witness" but Sharif was forthright in his denials.
Mr Corlett told the jury in his closing address the critical issue was what was in his client’s head at the time — did he know the complainant had withdrawn consent during their liaison?
He said Sharif’s behaviour afterwards was revealing.
The woman gave evidence that she was frosty towards him in the aftermath but he seemed oblivious, hugging her goodbye and messaging her from the airport before his flight home.
She also accepted, when they spoke by video call two days later, that he was surprised when she raised the rape allegations.
"Mubeen hadn’t realised he had kept going when she didn’t want him to, and he felt terrible about it," Mr Corlett said.
The complainant, at the time, messaged her flatmate from her bedroom while Sharif was inside saying she was "traumatised".
But she then told her friend: "It was painful so I told him to stop and he did."
The woman admitted while giving evidence that she wanted to resolve the matter privately but others became aware of the incident.
Mr Corlett said the complainant’s flatmate — a law student — decided it was rape and "things just kept snowballing".
He told jurors Sharif outed himself as a rapist online simply because the woman had told him so.
"She told me that I raped her and just said ‘sorry’. I feel bad ... for not knowing what happened," the defendant said.
His misapprehension was irrelevant, and what Sharif was thinking at the time was the nub of the issue, Mr Corlett said.
To prove a charge of rape it must be without a complainant’s consent but, critically, the defendant must be aware of that lack of consent.
