A woman thought a man who she alleged raped her in 1996 would escape with a warning without the necessity of a court hearing, a jury has heard.
"When I made my statement, I thought he should just get a caution and that would be the end of it," the 43-year-old woman told the Central Criminal Court.
She also said she had not understood the State had a criminal prosecution service. "I did not know such a thing existed in this country." When asked by Mr Edward Walsh SC, defending, if she had noted the alleged rape in her diary, she replied: "It's not the sort of thing you record in your diary."
She was being cross-examined for the second day in the trial of a 50-year-old man who has pleaded not guilty to raping her in Sligo on July 26th, 1996.
Mr Walsh put it to the woman that her claims of being raped were incorrect. She replied: "I wouldn't be here stressing myself out. I've had brain surgery and I was told it's one thing not to do if it did not happen."
She had suffered a number of difficulties in her life and had been attending counselling for the past two years. "If I wasn't telling the truth, why come back here and undo all the work I've done with counselling in the last two years?"
Mr Walsh suggested she had given various contradictory accounts of the alleged incident in her statement during her evidence on Monday and during cross-examination by him. She replied that she had not understood the court system and the need to give all the details of the alleged incident.
She said she was probably "in denial" when she made her statement on July 30th, 1996.
No one had told her about the need to go into every detail before she came to court, she said.
She had not wanted to make a complaint to gardai but her partner had alerted them. As a consequence she was in turmoil when they arrived. "In hindsight I should have gone to a lawyer and asked what was going to happen," she said.
A Garda witness said he heard the defendant claim during a Garda interview that the woman had consented to sex.
The trial before Mr Justice Carney continues.