AN AUSTRALIAN hotel owner was yesterday released from jail, where he spent the last 30 months, after a Manila regional trial court cleared him of raping a female employee. 

Wesley Prentice burst into tears and muttered thanks to the judge and to his lawyer after he heard the ruling of Judge Perfecto Laguio Jr. of the Manila RTC Branch 15.

In his 13-page decision, Laguio ruled Prentice was not guilty of rape after he found discrepancies in the account of the complainant, which led the court to conclude that the two had sex by mutual consent. 

When the complainant filed the case in Decermber 1998, her aunt and her counsel had demanded P5 million from Prentice to settle the case, the court found out. 

The complainant, a former nightclub dancer, who was not present when the judge made the ruling, accused Prentice of raping her twice in 1998. She claimed that the first rape happened in August in a hotel in Olongapo City and the second rape took place the following month in Ermita, Manila. 

But Prentice said he and the complainant had been lovers and that she fabricated the charges against him because he ended their relationship. He said his wife Dianne also harassed the complainant when she learned about their affair and wanted him to fire her. 

Prentice said that he hired the complainant for various positions in his hotels in Angeles City and even sponsored her studies in a computer school. He said he even gave her a room in one of his hotels.

The complainant claimed that she accompanied him and four other female employees to a party at the Bart’s Hotel in Olongapo in August. She said she got dizzy, fell asleep and later woke up nude, her sex organ hurting and bleeding, and Prentice asleep beside her. 

She said that the following month, she and Prentice went on a business trip to Manila and checked in at the Royal Palm Plaza Hotel in Ermita, where she claimed Prentice entered her room and raped her again. 

She said Prentice and his henchmen illegally detained her and guarded her most of the time. She said she only got in touch with her relatives in Laguna through the telephone to let them know about her predicament.

But the court found the defense’s version of the events as "more plausible and persuasive, and has to be accorded more weight," than the prosecution’s.

If the complainant was indeed drugged in the first case and then raped by Prentice, it was not natural for the accused to sleep beside her afterwards, since she would surely discover what happened to her upon waking up and he would be the logical suspect, the court said.

In the second case, the court found it odd that she did not make any effort to escape, use the telephone or raise any outcry to let other people, such as hotel staff and guests, know she was raped.

"Such quietude, passivity and inactivity created in the mind of the court reasonable doubt as to her truthfulness and good faith," the judge said.

The court also learned that the complainant was not guarded when she went to school and could have gone easily to police.