Alleged victim accused of seduction

A teenage alleged rape victim was described yesterday as a hardened former prostitute who tried to seduce a loanshark to clear her boyfriend's gambling debt.

The 17-year-old admitted in the High Court that by the time she was 15 she had frequently 'spent the night in the arms of strange men' to earn money for her 19-year-old boyfriend.

'I stood at one spot on the street and men would approach me. I would take my clothes off in a room and I had to touch their bodies. But when we had sex I would just lie there and let the men do it,' the girl said.

She denied she used sex as a lure when she met Cheng Man-fat in a Cheung Chau holiday villa last September.

She told the court her days of trading sex to help her cash-strapped boyfriend were over.

The girl said she originally agreed to sex, but when she changed her mind, Cheng raped her. He denies rape, non-consensual buggery and blackmail.

The teenager said she went with Cheng, 24, to find out where her boyfriend was. She had allegedly met Cheng in Macau several days earlier. Her lover was in debt at a casino and asked her to bring money.

But Eric Kwok, for the defence, suggested she was the one who instigated the meeting at the villa on September 12.

'In the conversations it was you who suggested that you go to Cheung Chau to get the money. When you failed to raise the cash it was you who tried to seduce the defendant to defer [the boyfriend's] payment,' Mr Kwok said.

He asked the girl why she would refuse to have sex to help her boyfriend since she had done it so frequently in the past.

The girl angrily said that 'once a prostitute, doesn't mean you are a prostitute for your whole life'.

He suggested she had not tried to contact her boyfriend before meeting Cheng and had fabricated the rape story.

The case continues.