Luke Lazarus, who has been found guilty and jailed for at least three years for raping a woman in the back alleyway of his father’s Kings Cross nightclub, is appealing his conviction.
At the trial, the woman said that she tried to leave, but Lazarus told her to stay. Shortly after, he told her “put your fucking hands on the wall, get on the floor and arch your back”. Out of fear of what may happen if she did not, the woman did what he had said to do. He anally raped her for approximately 10 minutes, during which time the woman told him she was a virgin.
He also told the woman to add her name to his list of conquests in his phone (a list of women’s names was later found in the Notes section of his phone), and sent a text message to a friend saying ,”I honestly have zero recollection of calling you … Was a sick night – took a chick’s virginity.”
Lazarus, although showing emotion and remorse in the courtroom, seems to be more concerned about his own future rather than that of the victim of his actions, saying, “my life, at least in Australia, has been completely destroyed,” and that he had had “the world at his feet”. During the trial, Lazarus said he was “inconsolable”, and that he still maintains that he “believes everything that happened that on that night was consensual.”
The woman had this to say about the awful experience:
I thought that once I left the alleyway the pain would go away … but it didn’t… Everything that made me who I was stayed in that alleyway… I’ll never be who I was … A part of me died that day, the part that trusted others, the part that saw the good in everyone.
Photo by Ian Waldie/Getty Images
