Cameron David Horne fails to overturn rape conviction

A former top Queensland banker has tried to blame repeatedly raping a sleeping woman on a luxury yacht on an allergic reaction to mud crab.

A top Queensland banker has lost his bid to overturn his conviction after repeatedly raping a sleeping woman on a luxury yacht.

A former top Queensland banker claimed he was not criminally liable for repeatedly raping a sleeping woman on a luxury yacht because he had an “allergic reaction” to mud crab, was drunk, and had mixed alcohol with antibiotics.

Cameron David Horne failed in his bid to have the nation’s highest court overturn his rape conviction with the unusual defence thrown out.

Horne was convicted by a jury of four counts of rape and one of sexual assault and sentenced in the District Court in Brisbane December 2021 to three years’ jail, suspended for three years after he serves one year behind bars.

Lawyers for the long-married father of three from The Gap told the jury that when raping the woman he was “affected by a delusion that the woman was consenting”, due to his involuntary intoxication caused by crab allergy, alcohol and antibiotics.

He lost his case in the Court of Appeal in April last year, when he unsuccessfully challenged a 40-year-old legal precedent, then applied for special leave to the High Court, with top silk Saul Holt KC unsuccessfully arguing that Horne should not be convicted as he suffered from “altered consciousness amounting to delirium” due to a combination of allergy to mud crab, drunkenness and the combination with his antibiotics.

But in December 2022, the High Court rejected his application to overturn his conviction.

The now 64-year-old raped the woman on a yacht berthed at Manly marina on October 17, 2018 following a boozy bankers networking lunch.

Horne, who spent most of his career as the Queensland manager of a key arm of a big-four Australian bank but more recently worked at loan broker Balanz North Pty Ltd, excused himself from drinks on the deck, saying he was going to the toilet but instead he went into the main cabin of the boat where she was sleeping under a doona after taking a cold and flu tablet.

He claims to have no recall of the rapes.

The woman told the jury that following the lunch she also attended, she was woken “by a man standing by her bed” who was digitally raping her.

At first, she thought it was her partner, but when she realised it was a stranger she was “shocked into immobility”.

After a few seconds he left the cabin, but returned 20 minutes later through a door linking her cabin to a guest bathroom, and repeated his actions.

She yelled at him and pushed the man’s arm away and he again left.

He returned again another 15 minutes later and the woman said she was too shocked to defend herself but tried to push his arm away but he digitally raped her again.

On a fourth occasion she held her legs together tightly and he stroked her breasts over her bra using both his hands, saying “I am (the name of her partner) tonight”.

She pushed Horne’s hands away and he left.

On the fifth visit, he again digitally raped her while asking: “How can I see you again?” and she kicked him in the torso.

“This made the man stumble out of the main door of the cabin where he fell over,”, a summary of the evidence in the Court of Appeal states.

The victim heard one of her friends ask Horne: “Gee, what’s wrong with your bladder?”

He replied: “Oh, it’s just my beer bladder”.

Guests finally left the boat at 7pm and the woman immediately told her partner that Horne had raped her.

When the man who invited Horne to the lunch phoned him in a “pretext call” with police to tell him the woman had accused him of sexual assault on the boat he responded: “Oh god, I was absolutely trolleyed”.

“Whether it was the mud crab, whether it was booze or whatever but ah I was just off my face,” Horne said in the call.

In a second pretext call Horne told his victim he was “on medication” and “shouldn’t have been drinking” and when he got home “I was unconscious in my garden for three hours. I don't even know how I got home so ah Jesus”.

She told him he was pretending to use the bathroom during the rapes.

“You didn’t even urinate, you just flushed the toilet … you must remember,” she said.