A man was yesterday cleared of raping a woman in the driver's seat of a car parked in Par-la-Ville Road.

The alleged sexual assault was said to have taken place in the early hours of March 31 last year, after the man and woman met at Splash nightclub.

Yesterday a Supreme Court jury took just over two hours to find the man — who cannot be named for legal reasons — not guilty.

The Prosecution claimed the defendant was drunk and had climbed over the woman in the car, using his weight to restrain her, forcing her to have sex.

Crown counsel Robert Welling said the woman suffered a "classic rape injury" of a 1cm by 3cm abrasion. He told the jury on Monday: "If this is a young girl who is lying, I suggest she would have given to you the Hollywood version of rape and not the version given from the witness box.

"You would not expect someone who was raped to then drive their attacker home. The alleged victim to then say the attacker says to her afterwards 'Are you coming in then?'. That's not the Hollywood version, that is the version of a girl who has told the truth, that things don't always turn out the way you expect them to when you see films of women screaming, clothing torn. That is the fantasy and not the reality."

He said: "This is we say, the case of a young man who was drunk. A young man who thought she fancied him and thought all he had to say was 'I fancy you' and she'd be ready and willing, but he didn't like it when she didn't take him seriously.

"He showed her just how serious he was when he moved across, pulled down her pants and underwear with his hands and legs and subjected her to a sexual assault."

However, defence lawyer Rick Woolridge Jr. claimed the woman's account was "errant nonsense".

"There are no injuries, no signs of a struggle," he said. 'We say this is because the sex was consensual, and the abrasion would have been caused by the angle of the sex to the seat in the car.

"I submit to you that what you did hear is the Hollywood version, the version which secures the sympathies of her boyfriend to overshadow whatever they were arguing about before. She needed to get his sympathies to get back in the door, and at the same time cover up that she'd had sex.

"We're not talking about tears and rips and bruising from holding down. It was fully consensual."