On a break in Budapest, 31-year-old Mackenzie Michalski met an attractive stranger, had a few drinks, went dancing and felt safe enough to go back, hand in hand, to his apartment. The stranger, Lorcan Tadgh Murphy – a self-described writer/property developer/marketing entrepreneur reared by an affluent, supportive family in Killiney, Co Dublin – rewarded the young American nurse’s trust by tying her up with a belt, beating her, biting and murdering her in a prolonged act of strangulation. He then filmed her body before dumping it 150km away.

His defence, literally, was that she asked for it. She asked for “rough sex”, he claimed; it was she, he said, who had asked him to place his hands around her neck. It was nonsense, and he was jailed last week for 14 years. Mackenzie was a slight young woman with chronic neck pain. She was also a specialist neurological nurse who knew full well the dangers of strangulation.

But “rough sex” gone wrong – the defence offered by Murphy’s Hungarian lawyers – was not a novel one. The term has been in use for decades to describe extreme acts of sexual violence.

It’s nearly 40 years since the notorious New York trial of Robert Chambers for the murder of Jennifer Levin marked the popularisation of the so-called “rough sex” defence.

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