Luke Rao: Perth doctor’s lies during pretext call to alleged rape victim were ‘entirely logical’, lawyer says

A string of lies a doctor accused of rape said on a phone call recorded by police was an “entirely logical” and rational thing to do, according to his legal counsel. During his closing address on Thursday afternoon, top barrister David Grace KC reminded Perth’s District Court that Luke Rao had been willing to take the stand and face the jury - “warts and all”. Mr Grace described Mr Rao as a man of “honesty, integrity and humility”. It came a day after the 26-year-old trainee doctor, accused of two counts of sexual penetration without consent against a fellow medical student, admitted he’d told a number of untruths to his alleged victim during a pretext call, a conversation organised and recorded by police as a means of obtaining a confession. During the call, Mr Rao told the woman that after she wrote him a letter accusing him of rape, he’d realised what had happened between them “was probably certainly more closer to that (rape) than what I originally thought”. Mr Rao at the time also described having grappled with whether he wanted “to accept that about myself”. “Like is that truly what happened?” he asked during the call, later admitting: “You were too drunk for it not to be (consensual).” During the recorded conversation, played in court, the woman told Mr Rao she had tried to “tried to make it clear” on that night in question “that I didn’t want to do it”. In response, Mr Rao said he’d thought her reasoning had related to her not wanting to lead him on. “It was a complete misread from me,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I was much more caught up in my feelings of guilt.” While testifying during his week-long trial, however, Mr Rao claimed any apologies or implied admissions he’d offered during the call had been made only to appease the woman on the other end of the line. “I wanted to convey that. . . I’d come around to her viewpoint and I believed what she was saying (that it was rape),” he said. “But I didn’t believe it (myself).” Mr Grace said his client’s thought process was “entirely logical” and rational. “Had he challenged her and made her feel worse, there was a real risk in his mind that she would go to police,” he said, adding that the woman had in fact already gone to police at the time of the pretext call, unbeknown to Mr Rao. He also pointed out that his client never tried to talk the woman out of contacting authorities. “He didn’t need to (dissuade her). He knew he had done nothing wrong,” Mr Grace said. “His actions are very far from the actions of a guilty man.” During her own closing address, State prosecutor Rebekah Sleeth said the alleged victim had been an honest and reliable witness who “just did her best to tell the truth”. Whereas Mr Rao, she said, had admitted to the jury during his evidence that he’d “just lied and lied on that pretext call”. Earlier in the trial, the court was told the woman, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, has no memory of how she came to be naked in her bed with Mr Rao beside her on the night in question. It is alleged that shortly after waking up in that position, the alleged victim rolled to her side and pretended to be asleep, but that Mr Rao began touching her. From the witness box earlier this week, the woman told the jury after Mr Rao had failed to get the hint, she’d told him she was feeling stressed, and that “I don’t think we should do this”. In response, Mr Rao asked “why not?”, prompting the woman to tell him “because I think it means something different to you than it does to me.” He then talked for a short time longer about why he was “OK with it”, before concluding “it doesn’t matter to me, it’s OK”. That’s when the woman says Mr Rao sexually penetrated her without consent two times. “She was in shock, and in that moment all her body could do was freeze,” Ms Sleeth said, adding that their conversation “hadn’t finished in her mind”. The woman testified the alleged incident had been “extremely painful and horrible”, and that she’d been lying flat on her back, motionless and unable to look at Mr Rao. Eventually, the woman’s position on the bed changed, with the State arguing it was Mr Rao who had “flipped” her onto her stomach before penetrating her again. But Mr Grace questioned how that claim could be true, given his client had had two broken fingers at the time. He also asked why the woman hadn’t said “no” or “stop” to Mr Rao, suggesting that it was because “she was trying not to hurt his feelings”. Ms Sleeth told the jury there had been no kissing during the alleged incident — unlike some of the previous occasions the pair had been intimate, and that Mr Rao had been unable to specify what the woman had been doing with her arms and legs, or with the rest of her body, to indicate she was actively participating. “He didn’t care whether she was consenting or not, he just did what he wanted to do,” Ms Sleeth argued. In closing, Mr Grace told the jury that even if they found that the woman had not given consent, the State could not prove that his client hadn’t held an honest and reasonable belief that she was in fact consenting. The trial continues.