The full story of a sexual predator named ‘Hope’

Tuesday, 1 October 2024

One morning in 2021, an 18-year-old woman rang 111 to report an alleged rape. The call blew open a years-long investigation into a man called ‘Hope’, who police believed was raping and filming women. Jake Kenny reports.

In the early hours of February 21, 2021, 18-year-old Kylie, not her real name, walked home, tears running down her face. That night, she had been out dancing and drinking with a friend. Now, she was overwhelmed with confusion. A man walked with her, helping her wipe the tears as they fell. All Kylie could think was, I need to get away from this guy. When she got home she waited until she was sure the man had gone then rushed to the phone and dialled 111. Her words were barely above a whisper:

“This guy raped me.”

The man named Hope

A week later, Kylie sat in an interview room at Christchurch police station and told an officer her story. She said she’d been out with her friend at Original Sin bar on Oxford Tce. About 2am, a man wearing a shiny silver Louis Vuitton puffer vest and light blue jeans asked to buy her a drink. He was six feet tall, dark-skinned and had short black dreads or braids. Kylie’s friend had met the man before and knew him as ‘Hope’.

At this point, Kylie says she was already drunk. Much of what happened next police pieced together later through CCTV footage and statements from Kylie’s friend.

After having shots, she and Hope kissed on the dance floor. Soon after, bouncers asked her to leave - she was too intoxicated. About 3am, Kylie, Hope, Kylie’s friend and another man they knew caught a taxi together.

Kylie had been planning to go to her parents in Wigram, but Hope said he lived close to there. Why not carpool to his place? It was agreed. CCTV footage on Manchester St showed Hope and Kylie holding hands while they waited.

Read more: ‘It was worth it’ - rape survivor speaks out

In the taxi, Kylie passed out. When they got to Hope’s place on Deal St, she threw up on the side of the car and in the street. Kylie’s friend said she needed to take Kylie home, but Hope insisted she just needed to come inside and have some water.

Kylie had to be carried indoors. She lay on a couch while Hope got her a bucket, which she vomited into at least once. Her friend brought some water. Then, everyone went to bed.

The next part, Kylie remembered clearly. In the police interview room she started sobbing as she recounted it, taking long pauses to steady herself.

She claimed she woke up on the couch to Hope having sex with her. The same man who had bought her shots, convinced her to come to his house and got her a bucket to throw up in. She remembered the shock and telling him to get off her, which he did.

“I started crying and he asked why I was crying [and to] stop crying,” Kylie told the officer. “I was scared because I didn’t want to confront him too aggressively. I just said I was fine and he walked me home.”

_Do you know more, or are you affected and wish to speak to a reporter? Email** jake.kenny@stuff.co.nz _confidentially.**

Kylie’s complaint triggered a flurry of police activity. After her 111 call, two officers responded and took her to the Cambridge Clinic to be assessed for signs of sexual assault. In the meantime her friend gave a statement helping to identify the man. She knew him as Hope Muchirahondo.

His full name was John Hope Muchirahondo. He was 35, and already under suspicion for numerous sexual assaults. The investigation even had a name - Operation Hope.

Ultimately a jury was unable to reach a verdict on a rape charge relating to Kylie, but they found Muchirahondo guilty of raping eight other women.

One of many denials

The morning after Kylie’s interview, police searched Muchirahondo’s Deal St home. They found Kylie’s phone there but not Muchirahondo. He was arrested that evening in another part of the city and informed that Kylie had made a sexual assault complaint against him. “No-one was raped,” he replied.

When he spoke to police, he denied that he and Kylie had sex at all. He said Kylie came back to his house, but she was too drunk to do anything. He gave her a blanket and a bucket and left her. When he came back, she was crying and said she wanted to leave. He helped her look for her phone, and when they couldn’t find it he walked her home. That was it, he said.

Muchirahondo said he touched Kylie sexually at the bar, but nothing happened at his house.

“I would’ve thought you guys would have done your investigation. At the bar she was all over me… The girl was down. If it wasn’t for alcohol we would have f….d. This is the system. The female is always believed. We are black, we know the process.” He refused to be formally interviewed and requested a lawyer.

After 40 hours of deliberation, the jury was hung and could not decide whether Kylie or Muchirahondo was telling the truth. But they did reach a decision on 18 other charges, finding him guilty of sexual assaults against nine women, including the rape of eight women. He was found not guilty on a further eight charges and acquitted on those. The jury could not agree and were hung on five charges, including the alleged rape of Kylie.

Kylie’s complaint was key to the wider police investigation. It allowed officers to gain access to Muchirahondo’s phone. And there, the disturbing scale of Operation Hope was laid bare.

They found dozens of explicit videos and images appearing to show Muchirahondo performing a number of different sexual acts on women. Many of them appeared to be asleep while they were being assaulted. One could be heard loudly snoring. There was also a “Keepsafe Vault” app requiring a passcode that investigators couldn’t access.

The officer in charge of Operation Hope, Detective Inspector Nicola Reeves, drafted a media release.

It didn’t identify Muchirahondo by name but it mentioned his age, that he was from overseas and that he met several of his complainants in nightclubs. It asked anyone who might have suffered a sexual assault from such a man to come forward. A string of people did.

‘It’s not my responsibility’

John Hope Muchirahondo is from Mutare, a provincial city of about 500,000 people in Zimbabwe’s east, near the border with Mozambique. He is one of more than 30 siblings from his father’s 13 wives. Muchirahondo himself has had children with several women since arriving in Aotearoa.

He came to New Zealand as a 22-year-old with his mother in 2008. They settled in Christchurch, except for a stay in Auckland shortly after the earthquakes. Muchirahondo at times travelled between both centres and made a name for himself as an amateur footballer, playing for Waitakere City in the north, and Halswell United and FC Twenty 11 in the south.

He otherwise appeared to lead an unremarkable life. He worked as a fibre broadband installer and coached kids football on the weekends. He held a minority shareholding in a Christchurch landscaping company. He was well known in the nightclub scene but never drank heavily. He often offered to sober-drive his friends.

It was March 2019 when he first came to the attention of police. Jenny, not her real name, who had been in an on-again, off-again relationship with Muchirahondo since 2009, told police he had raped her during a visit to her home.

She said Muchirahondo had come to discuss a personal matter. Before she knew it, he was pushing her and guiding her down the hall to her bedroom, laughing at her as she told him she didn’t want to have sex. “I didn’t fight back or yell or scream,” she said. “I felt quite trapped. He just made me feel like my feelings didn’t matter.”

Muchirahondo was interviewed by a detective about the incident seven months later. He dismissed Jenny’s allegations as lies. In a near hour-long rant, he offered police several theories as to why. Jenny had weight issues, anxiety, food addictions and depression, he said. “The rejection from men and society and being shunned, and words that people say, makes [her] live in a lonely world.”

Then, Muchirahondo made a startling admission. He said he had videos to prove that he was in a consensual sexual relationship with her. “Most… if not all, sexual encounters I’ve had, after I realised that people can make allegations, I record,” he told the detective. “A lawyer told me that the only thing that can save a man is video evidence.”

Muchirahondo said Jenny tried to set a trap by having sex with him and then claiming it was rape. She would never say no to having sex with him. “God will deal with her,” he said. “I already know her future.”

He left without being charged and Jenny’s complaint was closed. She was one of three women who made complaints about him that had stalled. Another was Eleanor, also not her real name. In July 2019, she complained to police that Muchirahondo raped and sexually violated her after a party at her flat, when she was so drunk she vomited and blacked out.

Again, he denied the allegations. “We had consensual sex,” he told a detective months later. “Not only once, three times… in the morning, everything was cool.”

He said Eleanor called him some time later angry and told him she was too drunk to consent. “I said, ‘I knew you were drunk. It’s not my responsibility’.” Muchirahondo told police he even got her a bucket to vomit in but by the time they had sex, it was consensual. They’d been flirting earlier in the night, he said.

Later in the interview, Muchirahondo said women in New Zealand dressed differently to those in his culture.

“She was dressed more like, you know, hookers in the streets. The presentation that night is what modern girls are doing, urban girls do when they go to party. You go to the bar, you see women exposing their bodies like that. But in my culture, it wouldn’t be the best way to dress.”

In June 2020, Ursula, not her real name, came forward about an incident she said happened that January. It was her complaint that led police to set up Operation Hope.

After meeting Muchirahondo on a night out, Ursula said he convinced her to go with him to a friend’s house. There, she took one sip of a drink he gave her and felt “completely inebriated”. She remembered telling Muchirahondo she wanted to go home. The next thing she could recall was waking up somewhere else to him having sex with her.

“It was really rough,” she said. “I couldn’t do anything. It was like I wasn’t in my body. I could feel what was happening but couldn’t do anything to stop it.”

‘I feel like his plaything’

On Monday this week, Muchirahondo was found guilty of sexually assaulting Jenny, Eleanor and Ursula.

He was found guilty of raping eight women. He met many of them at parties or on nights out and had sex with them when they were heavily intoxicated or unconscious.

Two of the women were identified from the videos on his phone. One of them, Sue, not her real name, who had been in a casual relationship with Muchirahondo, didn’t know she had been filmed until detectives showed her screenshots from the footage.

It showed Sue being raped and sexually violated while she slept. She told detectives she suffered from manic depression and bipolar disorder, and the medication she took made her go into a deep sleep. This was something she had told Muchirahondo while they were together, she said.

“It’s a violation,” she said in her interview, which was played to the court. “I feel very vulnerable. I don’t know what he’s been doing with these. I feel like his plaything. That he’s playing with something that’s dead, or half-dead… He’s crossing a massive line. This man needs to go to prison.”

During the two-month trial, which began in late July and did not end until the last day of September, the jury heard evidence from 15 alleged victims including Kylie, Jenny, Eleanor, Ursula and Sue.

Many described Muchirahondo sparing no expense in buying them drinks on nights out, while he drank very little or nothing at all. He introduced himself as an African prince to one and told another his name was Jordan.

Some said they had consensual experiences with him before he helped himself to their bodies.

Most of the women described waking up to him having sex with them after a heavy night of drinking.

“I didn’t understand what was going on,” one woman told the jury. “I started yelling at him, ‘Please don’t, it hurts… When I told him to stop I remember him saying, ‘No baby, it’s OK, go back to sleep’.”

The women identified from Muchirahondo’s phone said they were asleep at the time and had no recollection of the sex. Nor did they consent to being filmed. Some of the video content shown to the jury was graphic.

Throughout, Muchirahondo listened carefully to the evidence and took regular notes. He passed many messages to his lawyers. He shook his head often, and even laughed at some of the evidence. During breaks, he shot frequent prolonged stares at the media bench.

To advance his case, he produced numerous videos of him having what appeared to be consensual sex with some of his complainants. Each of the women said they did not consent to being filmed in these cases either, and didn’t know it was happening.

During cross-examination, some of the women became visibly upset as defence lawyer Anselm Williams showed them footage and asked them to confirm that it was them in the videos.

One of the women, Eleanor, could be heard saying her then-boyfriend’s name in the clip and explained that she thought, in her heavily intoxicated state, that she was having sex with him and not Muchirahondo.

Jurors seemed to resent tactics used by the defence at times. They shook their heads as another of Muchirahondo’s lawyers, Kathy Basire, questioned the memory, reliability and motivations of some of the women. At times the women cried and had to take breaks.

Basire suggested one of the accusers was upset because she’d been asked to explain her lies to the jury. That triggered more sighs and disapproving head shakes from the jury box. It didn’t take long before the woman was reduced to tears again and asked to take another break.

The women were later praised for their “significant bravery and strength”. Following the verdicts. Reeves, on behalf of NZ Police said it had taken “grit and courage” for the complainants to tell their stories.

“They have had their memories attacked and attempts made to discredit their accounts. They have withstood the challenges and … should be incredibly proud.”

By the trial’s end, Muchirahondo, 38, was found to have raped or sexually violated nine of the 15 women, including many he targeted after he was first interviewed by police in April 2019.

“It is not easy to sit in judgement of a member of the community or hear from persons who have been affected”, Justice Lisa Preston told the jury.

“You have had to consider an extraordinary number of charges in this trial and there are reasons why you were tasked with that mammoth task… I thank you all.”

‘Could very well be more victims’

Perhaps the most disturbing part of Operation Hope is that it may never expose the full extent of Muchirahondo’s crimes. There are at least seven women on the videos on his phone who have not been identified. Reeves said there could well be other victims and urged anyone with concerns to contact police.

Operation Hope was a “once in a career” investigation, she said. Mostly because of its scale, but also because of the need to walk alongside so many women and help carry the emotional burden. “It’s one we will never forget.”

“We’ve been able to hear from these very brave women and support them through a prosecution. It’s for them. Everybody has a sister, a daughter, a mother and a friend. It’s also for all of us. This stuff has far-reaching emotional connections, it’s devastating for everybody.

“It’s not lost on us what these women have been through. It’s a privilege that they came forward and trusted us. That’s what we strive for every day.”

Muchiranhondo will be sentenced on December 13. The Crown has indicated it will seek an indefinite prison term of preventive detention.

Where to get help:

• Rape Crisis 0800 88 33 00, click link for local helplines.

• Victim Support 0800 842 846.

• Safetalk text 4334, phone 0800 044 334 webchat safetotalk.nz or email support@safetotalk.nz.

• The Harbour Online support and information for people affected by sexual abuse.

• Women’s Refuge 0800 733 843

• Male Survivors Aotearoa Helplines across NZ, click to find out more (males only).

• If you or someone else is in immediate danger, call 111.

If you or someone you know is in a dangerous situation, click the Shielded icon at the bottom of this website to contact Women's Refuge in a safe and anonymous way without it being traced in your browser history. If you're in our app, visit the mobile website here to access Shielded.