Rape accuser says police officer who investigated case made unwanted sexual advances for a year
More allegations against police officers are coming to light following the revelation that serial rapist police officer David Carrick got away with his crimes for years, despite opportunities to stop him.
Two women have told their stories to Sky News.
One says she was preyed on by the officer investigating her rape case, another claims her alleged rapist ex-partner worked in professional standards – the department that would investigate predatory police officers.
‘Amy’, not her real name, reported an alleged rape and says the male officer investigating began to make sexual advances towards her.
She says: “He started saying to me, ‘I have to say this to you now, or I’m never going to tell you. I really like you and I really want to take you out on a date’.
“To which I was obviously then quite vulnerable, I’d just had a baby, I’d been raped, I was in a very dark place. And this officer was quite confrontational face-to-face.”
She claims the officer suggested he come to see her at night, with a bottle of gin, even when she was living in a women’s refuge.
Amy says: “I was on edge, I thought ‘what if he does turn up? If he turns up, do I have to have sex with him? Is he going to make me have sex with him? If I don’t have sex with him, is my case going to get closed because of it?’
“To me, he had a lot of power.”
Amy says the unwanted advances continued for a year after the trial, and he also made them to a female witness.
Eventually, police turned up at Amy’s door, telling her that this man was being investigated for things he’d allegedly done to other women. But the damage was done.
“You just don’t trust the police anymore,” she says.
“I had to report an ex-partner for a domestic incident, and I honestly didn’t want to. I sat there and said to my sister ‘I’m not going back to the police.'”
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She added: “But there was an incident where he’d attacked me, and the neighbours had rung the police. And the police turned up and it was two male officers.
“And the male officers asked me to go outside and said, ‘can you come outside and speak to us?’
“I said, ‘absolutely no way am I coming outside, I’m not going anywhere with you on my own.'”
‘A string of complaints’
‘Charlotte’, whose name we have also changed, reported her ex-partner for alleged rape.
He was working for professional standards within the police, the department that investigates abusive officers.
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Charlotte worked in the force too, and says he should never have had that job because he’d had a string of complaints against him.
She told Sky News: “I think to be fair the whole force was shocked that he had a job in the professional standards department, because it was common knowledge that he had been investigated so many times, that’s what he was known for.”
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Despite previous allegations from other women, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) decided not to prosecute.
In a letter to Charlotte, they gave various reasons for dismissing her case such as “you were laughing as you told the suspect to ‘stop’.”
Another section states: “You could have pushed him away, and again he might not have heard you say ‘no’.”
And about another allegation where she claimed he was hurting her and had asked him to stop, it says, “He might have interpreted ‘ow’ in a different way, he might have believed you too were aroused by the hitting.”
‘Like I’ve been raped again’
The letter concludes: “To my mind you had the freedom to make a choice which included reluctantly consenting.”
Charlotte is disgusted by the legal concept of reluctant consent and says: “It’s just left me feeling like I’ve been raped again – but by the justice system, the people who are supposed to be looking after us.”
The force, which we’ve decided not to name, said that despite no criminal charges, Charlotte’s ex-partner faced a gross misconduct hearing, was dismissed and now remains on the barred list.
The CPS said: “We understand that our decision not to bring charges will be a disappointing one. Our role is to make decisions based on the evidence and the law.
“After carefully considering all the evidence in the case, including the account given by the complainant, we concluded the evidential requirement to bring a prosecution was not met.
“This decision was upheld following a Victims’ Right to Review and a detailed letter was sent to the complainant explaining the full reasons for our decision.”
It said all cases are dealt with “fairly and with integrity” and that people should continue to report rape and sexual assault to the police.
Charlotte believes predatory police officers gain confidence in the knowledge that so few rape cases reach court and that the stigma of speaking out also helps abusers.
But after seeing how serial rapist PC David Carrick escaped detection for so long, more women are deciding to break their silence.
The UK-US trade deal has been signed and is “done”, US President Donald Trump has said as he met Sir Keir Starmer at the G7 summit.
The US president told reporters in Canada: “We signed it, and it’s done. It’s a fair deal for both. It’ll produce a lot of jobs, a lot of income.”
Sir Keir said the document “implements” the deal to cut tariffs on cars and aerospace, describing it as a “really important agreement”.
“So this is a very good day for both of our countries – a real sign of strength,” the prime minister added.
Mr Trump added that the UK was “very well protected” against any future tariffs, saying: “You know why? Because I like them”.
However, he did not say whether levies on British steel exports to the US would be set to 0%, saying “we’re gonna let you have that information in a little while”.
Mr Trump also praised Sir Keir as a “great” prime minister, adding: “We’ve been talking about this deal for six years, and he’s done what they haven’t been able to do.”
He added: “We’re very longtime partners and allies and friends and we’ve become friends in a short period of time.
“He’s slightly more liberal than me to put it mildly… but we get along.”
Sir Keir added that “we make it work”.
As the pair exited a mountain lodge in the Canadian Rockies where the summit is being held, Mr Trump held up a physical copy of the trade agreement to show reporters.
Several leaves of paper fell from the binding, and Sir Keir quickly stooped to pick them up, saying: “A very important document.”
Sir Keir Starmer picks up paper from the UK-US trade deal after Donald Trump dropped it at the G7 summit. Pic: Reuters
The US president also appeared to mistakenly refer to a “trade agreement with the European Union” at one point as he stood alongside the British prime minister.
Mr Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs on countries in April. At the time, he announced 10% “reciprocal” rates on all UK exports – as well as separately announced 25% levies on cars and steel.
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In a joint televised phone call in May, Sir Keir and Mr Trump announced the UK and US had agreed on a trade deal – but added the details were being finalised.
Ahead of the G7 summit, the prime minister said he would meet Mr Trump for “one-on-one” talks, and added the agreement “really matters for the vital sectors that are safeguarded under our deal, and we’ve got to implement that”.
Whitehall officials tried to convince Michael Gove to go to court to cover up the grooming scandal in 2011, Sky News can reveal.
Dominic Cummings, who was working for Lord Gove at the time, has told Sky News that officials in the Department for Education (DfE) wanted to help efforts by Rotherham Council to stop a national newspaper from exposing the scandal.
In an interview with Sky News, Mr Cummings said that officials wanted a “total cover-up”.
Politics latest: Grooming gangs findings unveiled
The revelation shines a light on the institutional reluctance of some key officials in central government to publicly highlight the grooming gang scandal.
In 2011, Rotherham Council approached the Department for Education asking for help following inquiries by The Times. The paper’s then chief reporter, the late Andrew Norfolk, was asking about sexual abuse and trafficking of children in Rotherham.
The council went to Lord Gove’s Department for Education for help. Officials considered the request and then recommended to Lord Gove’s office that the minister back a judicial review which might, if successful, stop The Times publishing the story.
Lord Gove rejected the request on the advice of Mr Cummings. Sources have independently confirmed Mr Cummings’ account.
Education Secretary Michael Gove in 2011. Pic: PA
Mr Cummings told Sky News: “Officials came to me in the Department of Education and said: ‘There’s this Times journalist who wants to write the story about these gangs. The local authority wants to judicially review it and stop The Times publishing the story’.
“So I went to Michael Gove and said: ‘This council is trying to actually stop this and they’re going to use judicial review. You should tell the council that far from siding with the council to stop The Times you will write to the judge and hand over a whole bunch of documents and actually blow up the council’s JR (judicial review).’
“Some officials wanted a total cover-up and were on the side of the council…
“They wanted to help the local council do the cover-up and stop The Times’ reporting, but other officials, including in the DfE private office, said this is completely outrageous and we should blow it up. Gove did, the judicial review got blown up, Norfolk stories ran.”
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Grooming gangs victim speaks out
The judicial review wanted by officials would have asked a judge to decide about the lawfulness of The Times’ publication plans and the consequences that would flow from this information entering the public domain.
A second source told Sky News that the advice from officials was to side with Rotherham Council and its attempts to stop publication of details it did not want in the public domain.
One of the motivations cited for stopping publication would be to prevent the identities of abused children entering the public domain.
There was also a fear that publication could set back the existing attempts to halt the scandal, although incidents of abuse continued for many years after these cases.
Sources suggested that there is also a natural risk aversion amongst officials to publicity of this sort.
Read more on grooming gangs:
What we do and don’t know from the data
A timeline of the scandal
Mr Cummings, who ran the Vote Leave Brexit campaign and was Boris Johnson’s right-hand man in Downing Street, has long pushed for a national inquiry into grooming gangs to expose failures at the heart of government.
He said the inquiry, announced today, “will be a total s**tshow for Whitehall because it will reveal how much Whitehall worked to try and cover up the whole thing.”
He also described Mr Johnson, with whom he has a long-standing animus, as a “moron’ for saying that money spent on inquiries into historic child sexual abuse had been “spaffed up the wall”.
Asked by Sky News political correspondent Liz Bates why he had not pushed for a public inquiry himself when he worked in Number 10 in 2019-20, Mr Cummings said Brexit and then COVID had taken precedence.
“There are a million things that I wanted to do but in 2019 we were dealing with the constitutional crisis,” he said.
The Department for Education and Rotherham Council have been approached for comment.
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