photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Reston Phillips testifies Wednesday, May 14, 2025, at his rape trial in Douglas County District Court.

“Sorry, I’m asleep; I don’t know what happened.”

That’s how a man says he responded to a woman who had just accused him of rape.

The man, Reston Phillips, was 22 at the time. He is now 31, and on Wednesday he took the stand in his own defense in the eight-year-old rape case.

Earlier in the week the 30-year-old woman had testified that in the early-morning hours of May 14, 2017, she woke up on a couch to Phillips raping her from behind. Both were guests in a home in the 1200 block of Louisiana Street for KU graduation weekend. The woman reported the incident to police that same morning and went to the hospital for a rape exam.

Phillips on Wednesday told jurors a different version of events, namely that he had asked the woman if he could join her on the couch and that she had said yes. He said that the two, who had not met before that weekend, had talked for about an hour the previous night as they lay on separate couches in the living room — a “mostly light-hearted, getting-to-know-somebody” conversation.

He said that on this second night he got under the blankets with the woman after she consented and cuddled her from behind, placing his left arm between her breasts and then falling “right asleep.”

The next thing he remembers is her standing up in the morning and looking at him, he said. Both of their pants “were slightly down,” he told the jury, and the woman told him “something along the lines of ‘Dude, you raped me.'”

That’s when he told her he had been sleeping and “I don’t know what happened.”

He testified that he tried to get her to calm down and talk but that she wouldn’t. He was in a “shocked state,” he said, and repeated numerous times that he had been asleep.

When his attorney, Joe Huerter, asked if he had unbuttoned the woman’s shorts and pulled them down, the man decisively said, “No,” but then seconds later modified his answers to “I don’t know. I was asleep.” When asked whether he remembered his penis in her vagina, Phillips said, “No.”

Phillips did acknowledge evidence against him, including DNA results presented earlier in the state’s case, that his seminal fluid was found on a vaginal swab of the alleged victim. A forensic DNA analyst from the KBI, Jena Sparling, told jurors that Phillips was a match, meaning that he could not be excluded as a contributor.

On cross-examination, Deputy District Attorney David Greenwald asked Phillips if he agreed that the woman was asleep at the time, and Phillips said he couldn’t “speculate on that.”

Greenwald asked Phillips if he thought the woman wanted him to cuddle her. Phillips indicated that, even though he knew the woman was engaged, he had been drunk and high and had simply asked her if she wanted to and she said yes.

Greenwald, noting that Phillips is now himself engaged, asked Phillips how he would feel if someone cuddled his fiancée, to which Phillips responded, “That’s a strange question,” before Judge Amy Hanley sustained Huerter’s objection to that line of inquiry.

Phillips said that after the incident he went to his friend’s room in a different part of the house and tried to wake him up to talk to him, but his eyes were glazed over and he wasn’t responsive. Phillips said he never got “the opportunity” to tell his friend the version of events that he related to the jury Wednesday morning.

Detective Mike Verbanic told jurors that that friend, along with others in the house, had said at the time that Phillips was crying that morning, saying that he and the woman had woken up unclothed on the couch and that he wanted to kill himself. The friend also reported to police that he did not see Phillips overindulging in alcohol on the night in question.

A warrant for Phillips’ arrest was issued in March 2018, nearly a year after the incident. By that time he was living in Germany and studying to be an audio engineer. Phillips said that he continues to reside in Berlin.

He was finally arrested in September 2023 in Harris County, Texas. He has been free on a $30,000 bond since shortly after his arrest.

Huerter is expected to continue the defense’s presentation of evidence, including expert testimony regarding Phillips’ sleep behaviors, on Wednesday afternoon.