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The woman met Batchelor online and agreed to meet him at a bar for a drink. They ended up back at his apartment and the woman said Batchelor demanded oral sex. She described him as forceful, but said she thought if she told them to stop, he would.

But then, she said, Batchelor began anally raping her. She said she screamed “no!” loudly and pleaded for him to stop.

Beaudoin questioned her story, telling court: “Curiously, no one seems to have heard her cries.”

The judge then drew from the accused rapist’s testimony, noting that his Sandy Hill apartment was in an older building where noise from his unit could be heard by neighbours who would have been around at that time of night.

The judge sided with Batchelor, saying: “It is difficult to accept that he would have continued assaulting (the woman) with his knowledge that her very loud screams could be heard.”

“More significantly,” the judge noted that “photographic evidence of (the woman’s) injuries is consistent with Batchelor’s testimony that he bit her once, after her request for rough sex.” A rape kit showed no obvious signs of injuries, court heard.

As for the alleged anal rape and “rough sex,” the judge said he found it difficult to accept the complainant’s “increasingly dramatic descriptions of the violent rape she claims to have ultimately endured when the photographic evidence and the hospital reports are reviewed.”

And the judge said he struggled to reconcile the woman’s behaviour on the stand with her testimony.