Where a complainant's trial evidence on a critical matter (here, communicating inability to remember a safe word) is inconsistent with an earlier detailed police statement, that discrepancy may be sufficient to render a conviction unreasonable, particularly where the discrepancy goes to the heart of whether the accused could have held an honest and reasonable but mistaken belief in consent. The case also illustrates that in 'rape role play' scenarios, the prosecution must exclude beyond reasonable doubt that the accused was not mistaken as to consent, and a discrepancy in the complainant's evidence about communicating withdrawal of consent through the agreed mechanism (safe word) may be fatal to the prosecution case.
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