Woman, 62, leaves with her cheating boyfriend clinging to the hood, hears the court

After finding her boyfriend cheating on him, a Dunedin woman allegedly stole a wallet and left with the man clinging to the hood of her car.

The 62-year-old defendant, whose name is withheld until the end of the trial, has pleaded not guilty to the charges of robbery and assault with a weapon.

Crown prosecutor Craig Power told jurors in Dunedin District Court yesterday that the woman had been in a relationship with a Waihola man for a year when he abruptly called it off on the morning of June 14.

He told the defendant not to come to her house as planned, that it was all over and that he did not want to give her “false hope”.

She went anyway.

Power said the woman entered her boyfriend’s room and, after talking to him, wandered around the house looking for the other woman.

The third, meanwhile, had locked herself in another room.

The defendant was “clearly angry and upset,” Power said, and returned to her boyfriend’s room and threw the other woman’s property on the ground.

She demanded that the man return some of her belongings and he duly loaded them into her car.

However, as she was leaving, the man confronted her, believing she had stolen something, the jury was told.

“How did she react?” Power said.

“The Crown alleges … she has driven him with the car, has hit him and he has ended up on the hood and she has started driving down the gravel road.”

The man is alleged to have smashed the windshield in an attempt to arrest the defendant.

Power said she stopped the vehicle, in doing so throwing the plaintiff out of the car and onto the ground, before she drove away.

A six-minute phone call he later made to police would be part of the Crown’s evidence, the court heard.

In it, the defendant said that she had caught her boyfriend sleeping with someone else and, after an argument, got into the car and smashed the windshield.

Attorney Anne Stevens QC said there was no assault: her client simply wanted to leave the address and her boyfriend climbed on the hood to prevent her from doing so.

The man thought the defendant had his phone, Stevens said, and was concerned that its contents would expose him “as a cheater and a liar.”

The defendant was charged with stealing the woman’s wallet, which had never been found after the incident.

While Power accepted that the case was circumstantial, he said the theft was the only “reasonable inference.”

Stevens rejected that.

“[The defendant] had no interest in [the woman’s] wallet, he didn’t know what it looked like, he didn’t touch it, “he said.

The trial, before Judge Michael Crosbie and a jury of seven women and five men, is expected to last a couple of days.