Kidnap Trial Focuses on ‘Willing Companion’ Theme : Courts: Under aggressive questioning, Paula Harrington acknowledges she joked with Timothy Shue and referred to sex with him as ‘making love.’

Trying to show that an alleged kidnaping victim went willingly, a lawyer forced her to acknowledge on the witness stand Thursday that she joked and bickered with her accused captor while they were together and later referred to sex with him as “making love.”

Federal Public Defender Ellen Barry also sought to undermine initial statements to police by Paula D. Harrington of the Santa Clarita Valley in describing the time she was with Timothy Daniel Shue, who is being tried on charges of kidnaping her.

Barry questioned Harrington’s use of the word “erotic” and other nonviolent terms when she first told police that she had sex with Shue.

“And you described the sex acts to officers as ‘making love’?” Barry asked Harrington in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.

“I may have,” Harrington replied quietly. “I’ve learned some new words since then. . . .”

“Are you saying, Mrs. Harrington, that you didn’t know the word ‘rape’?” Barry responded.

Harrington replied that she did, but was in a state of shock at the time of the initial police interviews and “hadn’t processed” what had happened to her.

Barry also drew from her an admission that in describing to police how Shue forced her to model fishnet stockings for him and other sexual acts, that she described the experience as “erotic.”

Later, under redirect questioning by Assistant U.S. Atty. Debra W. Yang, Harrington said she used the words “making love” for having sex with Shue because that was how she related to sex with her husband and the term was familiar to her.

Harrington, a 27-year-old former real estate agent, says Shue abducted her at gunpoint on June 29 while she was showing him homes in Val Verde. She was found July 1, bound and gagged but otherwise unharmed in a Gila Bend, Ariz., hotel room.

Shue, a 38-year-old Michigan native and convicted armed robber, was arrested July 6 at a Utah bar. He could be sentenced to life in prison without parole if convicted.

His defense has been that Harrington, unhappy in her marriage, was a “willing companion” on a trip across Southern California until she learned he was on parole.

Much of Thursday’s testimony was highly intimate and graphic, just as it was earlier in the week when a tearful Harrington told jurors that Shue had kept tight control of her every move, repeatedly threatened her with his handgun and raped her during a terrifying trip to Arizona.

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During cross-examination Thursday, as Barry repeatedly challenged Harrington’s credibility, Harrington seemed resigned to her public exposure. Grilling her over her failure to even try to escape, Barry asked Harrington:

“The only thing you were really afraid of was the damage to your reputation, no?”

“No,” Harrington answered.

“The only thing you were afraid of was divorce.”

“Never.”

“The only thing you were afraid of was being publicly humiliated,” Barry continued.

“Well,” Harrington replied, “I’m being publicly humiliated now, but I’ll live through it.”

Living through the experience was the only motive for her actions while she was with Shue, Harrington testified later, and if she joked with him during lighter moments, it was because “when I was playful with him, he was calmer and nicer to me.”

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Although Harrington maintained “I was a victim of a crime” and repeatedly denied running off with Shue, she acknowledged under Barry’s aggressive questioning that he bought her a hamburger dinner while they were viewing property together, and that he allowed her to choose any music tape she wanted to hear in his Jeep after she complained about his endless playing of songs by Anita Baker.

“It was driving me nuts,” she responded in court.

She also admitted to boldly criticizing Shue’s driving, calling him “stupid” when he got lost looking for a camping goods store, and to arguing with him over a pizza he ordered but she didn’t feel like eating. At one point, Harrington acknowledged, she refused his demand for her bank card access code, prompting him to quip: “I’m the man with the gun, lady, remember?”

“You weren’t really afraid of him, were you?” Barry asked.

“I think I’ve testified a number of times how afraid I was of him,” Harrington said.

Barry also challenged Harrington’s demeanor during interviews with detectives, suggesting that she was inappropriately calm, repeatedly laughed and even jokingly demeaned her husband’s sexual prowess.

Harrington countered, “It was an embarrassed, uncomfortable kind of laugh.”

The prosecution rested its case Thursday and so did the defense, without calling any witnesses.