photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

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

Updated at 4:20 p.m. Wednesday, May 14

“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 — and a defense expert told a Douglas County jury that the man was “likely” experiencing sexsomnia at the time.

Sexsomnia, as the witness, Dr. Clete Kushida, explained, is “unusual behavior that’s sexually related during sleep,” which might include intercourse, fondling or masturbation.

The man, Reston Phillips, was 22 at the time he denied knowledge of the incident. He is now 31, and on Wednesday he took the stand to tell jurors his side 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. She said she had been alone on the couch when she had fallen asleep and had never consented to any contact with Phillips. 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, shortly after lights out, 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 was not asked about and did not mention during his testimony that he suffered from any sleep disorders.

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. When his own attorney had asked him why he went over to her couch, he responded, “I don’t know.”

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.

Four men who testified Tuesday indicated that they had known Philips since high school but had not remained friends with him after that weekend. They said that during sleepovers at his house as teens they had never noticed him walking or talking in his sleep.

Detective Mike Verbanic told jurors that the friend Phillips was trying to wake up, 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.

The sexsomnia defense

Huerter put on an expert witness, Dr. Kushida, who said he had evaluated Phillips last November at Stanford University, where he works as a sleep medicine clinician and professor of psychiatry.

Kushida testified that Phillips “likely” was experiencing sexsomnia on the night of the alleged rape, but on cross-examination he said he couldn’t be 100% sure because he “wasn’t there,” and he also acknowledged that he had not read the police report in the case. He said his opinion was consistent with what he had been told about Phillips’ experiences with other “parasomnia” from an early age — for example, sleepwalking and night terrors.

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Dr. Clete Kushida of Stanford University testifies for the defense in Reston Phillips’ rape trial on Wednesday, May 14, 2025, in Douglas County District Court.

Kushida said that sexsomnia is well recognized in the medical community and that it’s estimated that 7.5% of the population experiences sexsomnia. On cross-examination, when asked if he had ever observed someone having such an episode, he didn’t directly answer, but said only that “it’s rare to observe a sexsomnia.”

Sexsomnia can be triggered by a variety of things, he said, such as loud noises, bright lights or internal triggers like sleep apnea, sleep deprivation, stress, drugs and alcohol.

Huerter asked Kushida if embarking on a career in Germany, as Phillips was about to do at the time of the incident, could be a stressor, and Kushida said, “Yes.”

During his evaluation of Phillips at Stanford, Kushida said, he discussed his personal history regarding sleep, his family history and any medical conditions. Though he also evaluated Phillips physically, he did not personally conduct a sleep study in a lab and said he had never personally observed a parasomnia event in Phillips. The sleep study was conducted at the University of Kansas Health System, and the person who conducted it was not called to testify.

Kushida’s report, which referenced the sleep study, was not presented to the state and the court until late in the trial process. Judge Hanley ruled that parts of it would not be admitted into evidence, citing prejudice to the state, and allowed Huerter to prepare a redacted copy of the report that the jury could see and that Kushida could testify about.

Greenwald attacked the sexsomnia explanation as being based on “self-reporting” by Phillips and asked Kushida, a highly paid expert witness, if everything he had done in terms of evaluating Phillips was done in anticipation of litigation. Kushida said, “Yes.”

“Based on what (Reston Phillips) told you after he’d been charged with rape?”

“Yes,” said Kushida, who mentioned earlier that he rarely acts as an expert witness and had done so only 11 times in the last 30 years.

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 Wednesday that he continues to reside in Berlin but is staying with his mom in Topeka pending the trial.

He was arrested in September 2023 — six years after the alleged rape — in Harris County, Texas. He has been free on a $30,000 bond.

The jurors — 11 women and four men (that includes three alternates) — will reconvene Thursday morning to hear closing arguments and begin deliberations.

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Reston Phillips is put under oath before being advised of his right to not take the stand Wednesday, May 14, 2025, in Douglas County District Court. His attorney, Joe Huerter, is at right.