Where a complainant's honesty is not challenged but their reliability is in issue due to mental health vulnerabilities, prior trauma, evolving memory, and susceptibility to interpreting events through the lens of repeated victimisation, the cumulative effect of these inadequacies — combined with discrepancies in the evidence — may render a guilty verdict unreasonable even though the discrepancies alone would not suffice. The distinction between credibility and reliability is critical: a jury may conflate the two, particularly where the trial narrative emphasises that the complainant 'does not lie' about sexual assault.
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