“She Said She’d Been Raped”: Witness Describes The Night, As Defence Challenges The Account Through Phone Records

By Alric Lindsay

A witness in a Grand Court rape trial has told a jury today, July 24, 2026, how the alleged victim walked towards her outside a Cayman nightspot, threw a set of car keys to the ground and said she had been raped – evidence the defence sought to test, call by call, against a record of the phone traffic that night.

The witness gave her evidence remotely by video link from overseas. Acting Justice Palmer directed the jury that evidence given by remote means “is of no less value or strength” than evidence given in the room, and that the arrangement gave the witness’s account “no greater or lesser value”.

Palmurugan Paulraj denies the charge. This report covers evidence of the witness only – her examination by Crown Counsel Ken Ferguson of the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, and her cross-examination by defence attorney Lee Halliday-Davis. The alleged victim is not named for legal reasons.

The evening, in the witness’s account

The witness told the court the two women went on a night out to mark the alleged victim’s birthday. She described picking her up on the afternoon of Monday, December 9, 2024, a meal and drinks at Yoshi Sushi’s, collecting the friend’s car, a stop at the witness’s home for a birthday cake, and then an evening out that took them to the Foundry, where their server introduced himself.

It was there, the witness said, that the server – whom she came to know as the defendant – introduced himself and, on overhearing that the women were celebrating birthdays, offered them tequila shots. Before the group left, she said, the defendant mentioned an event that night at Seven Mile Lounge, said he had tickets, and she took his contact number.

Outside the lounge

The heart of the witness’s evidence concerned what happened later that night outside the lounge.

The witness told the court she had lost sight of the alleged victim and went looking for her -upstairs, downstairs, and back again. When she came back down and out to the walkway, she said, she saw the alleged victim walking towards her.

“She was walking towards me, and then she said that she’s been raped,” the witness told the court. She described the alleged victim giving “a nervous smile like she does when she’s in pain”, her hair “out” and her dress disturbed.

She said the alleged victim had a set of keys in her right hand and threw them to the side.

The witness said she hugged her friend, and as they walked towards her car she asked whose keys they were; told they were the defendant’s, she went back and picked them up, because – she said – her friend had told her the incident happened in his car and she “wanted to make sure”. Pressing the lock button, she said, she saw the lights of a black vehicle flash.

The witness said she moved her own car to the back of the parking lot – “I didn’t want [him] to find us and I wanted to keep him away from her” – and called 911. Police, she said, arrived within five to ten minutes, their blue lights visible at the front of the building.

She also told the court the defendant had messaged her over WhatsApp that night saying the alleged victim had his keys.

The cross-examination: the phone records

Defence counsel Ms Halliday-Davis’s cross-examination worked methodically through a schedule of telephone calls between the defendant’s number and the two women’s phones across the evening and into the early hours of December 10.

She put a sequence of calls to the witness – a 36-second call at 9:45 pm, then a run of short calls after midnight of varying lengths, some answered and some not.

Ms Halliday-Davis advanced the defence case on several points of detail. She suggested the 9:45 pm call was the defendant phoning to say he would be late to the lounge, and that during it the witness had said the group were playing pool – which the witness accepted was possible.

Ms Halliday-Davis suggested that the witness was mistaken in recalling that the defendant had paid to get them into the event, putting to her that he had instead exchanged tickets for wristbands. And she suggested the witness was mistaken about ordering shots.

Defence counsel also drew from the witness an account of the earlier part of the evening inside: that at one point the witness saw the alleged victim and the defendant kissing, took her friend to the bathroom, and gave her “the option that she could either leave or that she could stay”, and that her friend chose to stay. Counsel put to the witness that, when the alleged victim later walked back towards her outside, she was “actually smiling” – which the witness did not accept in the terms suggested.

The trial continues

Acting Justice Palmer released the jury for the weekend with the usual direction not to discuss the case, and the trial was set to resume. This article is confined to the evidence of the witness; the trial continues and the defendant is presumed innocent unless and until the jury returns a verdict.