Ex-Policewoman Tells Court Defendant Raped Her : Trial: She testifies against former San Clemente officer charged with eight sexual offenses against three women.

A former San Clemente policewoman testified Wednesday that David Wayne Bryan, then a fellow officer on the city force, raped her at her home after they finished a night shift in June, 1990.

Bryan, who was fired from the force after three other women accused him of sexual offenses, faces up to 40 years in prison in connection with eight felony counts, including rape. He is free on $50,000 bail.

The woman who testified Wednesday was also terminated by the department at the conclusion of an 18-month probationary period and about a month after reporting Bryan’s assault to a Police Department superior, she said.

Now a law student, the 25-year-old Laguna Niguel woman followed on the witness stand a convenience store clerk who also testified that Bryan had raped her.

Bryan’s attorneys have denied that any rapes occurred, saying the sexual encounters were consensual between the defendant and the three women whose charges are part of this trial. Three misdemeanor counts, involving a fourth woman, are still pending.

The law student testified that Bryan, 33, told her that he was interested in renting a room at the house she shared with her fiance and asked if he could see it. She said that she agreed and that, once there, he asked if he could shower and nap in the room, which was on the floor below the woman’s.

Shortly after getting into her bed, the woman said she heard Bryan taking a shower. He then emerged from the bathroom nude and entered the hallway facing her bedroom. She said she first assumed he forgot to put something on, so she closed her eyes, turned away and pretended to be asleep.

“The next thing I knew he was standing at the end of my bed and was starting to pull the comforter off,” she said. “I turned over and said, ‘What are you doing? Don’t do this. We’re friends.’ ”

After fighting for composure, the woman continued: “He kept pulling the comforter down and crawling up and kissing me. I kept telling him, ‘No Dave, we’re friends. . . . I’m engaged, no, I don’t want this.’ I kept trying to push him off, but he’s a big guy.”

The woman said that Bryan pinned her to the bed by straddling her, saying, “You want this, I know you do.”

Asked by one of Bryan’s defense attorneys, Deputy Public Defender Denise Gragg, why she did not offer more physical resistance, the woman replied:

“How much do you have to physically resist to tell someone no? . . . He knew what he was doing was wrong.”

The woman acknowledged that she experienced a certain amount of confusion during the sudden attack because she considered Bryan a friend as well as a co-worker. A stranger, she said, never would have gotten to where Bryan did.

“If it was a stranger,” she said, “and I had a gun I probably would have shot him.”

Under direct examination by Deputy Dist. Atty. Jan C. Sturla, the woman also acknowledged that she did not report the incident immediately and offered an explanation.

“What was I going to say?” she asked. “Everyone (in the Police Department) knew we were friends. I invited him over. He was going to rent a room. . . . I was on probation. I still wanted to fit in at the department. I knew you . . . depend on everyone you work with to back you up. . . .

“It was his word against mine about what happened and it was easier for me to not say anything. . . .”

The woman said she continued to maintain cordial, although cooler, relations with Bryan on the job.

Bryan was placed on administrative leave by the Police Department after the convenience store clerk and a second woman accused him of rape in January, 1991, and was briefly hospitalized for an undisclosed ailment. He was fired last June.

The law student testified that she visited Bryan twice in the hospital while she was still on the police force. She asked him for details about the convenience store clerk’s charges, she said, because she was feeling guilty about not reporting her own rape.

After he was released from the hospital, Bryan called the police station and asked a dispatcher to send the woman officer to his house, where he asked her to be a character witness for him.

She testified that Bryan explained that he was asking her because, “if anybody has a (rape) case against me, you do.”

Last April, the woman said, investigators from the district attorney’s office contacted her and questioned her about her relationship with Bryan. After first denying any sexual relations with him, she told the investigators that the incident had been consensual, she testified.

She said she later went to a superior officer at the Police Department and accused Bryan of raping her.

That officer did not inform the district attorney’s office, she said. Shortly after she was fired, she went to the investigators herself, she said.