Four men have been found guilty over the gang rape of a woman after a jury rejected their claims she consented to group sex after one of them met her on Tinder.
The woman said she cried and repeatedly asked the men to stop as one by one three of them entered the bedroom of her apartment at Belmore, in southwest Sydney, and raped her in April 2022.
‘I said that I didn’t want to do it, but I was scared so I did it,’ the woman told the court earlier.
She had agreed to meet Adam Ahamd Kabbout, 27, who she met on the dating app, but after letting him into her home and taking a shower she found several other men she did not know also in the unit.
The woman said Kabbout eventually agreed to leave but first placed both of his hands on her cheeks and said: ‘OK, it’s your loss’.
A jury on Tuesday found Omar El-Sayed, 26, and Mohammed Ali, 22, guilty on two counts of sexual intercourse without consent in the NSW District Court.
Rami Katlan, 26, was convicted of one count of sexual intercourse without consent but cleared of two aggravated counts of sexual intercourse without consent.
Kabbout was found guilty of four counts of aggravated sexual assault in company but cleared on two other counts.
It took the jurors a little over 12 hours to arrive at their verdicts.
Family members of the men wept and wailed as the group were taken into custody.
One of the men yelled: ‘This is not right! I swear we’re innocent.’
While it was not alleged Kabbout had sex with the woman, the jury found he had encouraged the other men to do so.
‘In that way, he is liable as a participant for what the other accused did,’ Crown prosecutor Danny Boyle earlier told the court.
It was not in dispute during the trial that El-Sayed, Katlan and Ali all had sex with the woman, but their lawyers told the court she consented.
Police recovered a used condom from the woman’s bathroom containing DNA matched to El-Sayed, despite his initial claims to police he had not been at the apartment.
His lawyer, James Trevallion, said one of the reasons his client initially lied to police was because he was engaged at the time of the assault.
‘After that night he felt ashamed and embarrassed,’ he said.
‘He was about to get married. He cheated on his fiance.’
Documents tendered during the trial detailed searches made by the woman for what was described as ‘very sexually explicit’ group-sex material.
When questioned about whether the searches were evidence of her sexual interests, the woman replied: ‘I just wanted to see if the women in the videos were crying the way that I was crying.’
Judge Leonie Flannery told the jury the woman’s searches should not be taken to mean she consented to the sexual activity that was the subject of the trial.
‘This is not a court of morals,’ she said.
Mr Boyle told the jury Kabbout asked the woman if she was interested in having sex with multiple men during their conversations on Tinder and later Snapchat, but she said she was not.
The case has been listed for a sentence hearing on October 25.
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