Jacob Zuma was surprised that the woman who accuses him of rape left his bedroom after they had sex, the Johannesburg High Court heard on Wednesday.
He agreed with prosecutor Charin de Beer that he thought the woman would spend the rest of the night in his bed.
Zuma said after the two had consensual sex, he soon afterwards had taken a shower. Upon his return he found that the woman had left his bedroom.
He told the court the reason for taking the shower was to minimise his chances of contracting HIV from the woman as they had not used a condom.
Zuma said after he had put on his pyjamas and dressing gown, he went to the woman in the guest bedroom and asked her how she was.
Zuma said she replied: ”Fine, no problem”.
De Beer put it to Zuma that he had gone to the woman for the purpose of damage control as her behaviour had worried him.
He denied this.
He said it did occur to him to invite the woman back to his bedroom.
De Beer put it to Zuma that he would not have had intercourse with the woman in his bedroom due to the risk of his daughter walking in.
Zuma denied this, saying: ”My Lord, at night my daughter is in her room, she never comes to my room”.
The 31-year-old woman alleges that Zuma raped her in the guest bedroom of his Johannesburg home on November 2 last year.
He denies the charge, saying she had been sending him sexual signals the whole night. These included wearing a short skirt and no underwear under the wrap she wore to bed.
He believed she initiated sex by following him to his bedroom and getting under his covers.
De Beer, standing directly opposite him, with an orange lever-arch file of questions in front of her, did not blanche when asking him deeply intimate questions about what happened on the night in question.
She said that at his age he probably had a lot of sexual experience, which he agreed with.
At times Zuma laughed and smiled at her questions, with the public gallery trying to stifle its mirth after a warning from Judge Willem Van der Merwe.
De Beer rejected Zuma’s contention that he would have been accused of rape if he had refused to have sex with the complainant when they discovered they had no condom.
”I can’t imagine that in any culture that that’s a rule,” she said.
She continued: ”in no culture is it a reason for condomless sex”.
The complainant has said that because she is HIV-positive she would never have sex without a condom.
Zuma says he is HIV-negative. – Sapa