A MAN has been cleared of drugging and sexually assaulting a woman.
Christopher Adams (47) was accused of giving the woman the anti-anxiety drug diazepam and abusing her after she passed out.
He always denied the charge of sexual penetration without consent and was yesterday found not guilty by jurors following a three-day trial in the Royal Court.
Outlining the prosecution’s case earlier this week, Crown Advocate Carla Carvalho told the jury that the woman had visited Mr Adams’s flat after the pair bumped into each other at a mutual friend’s house and went to two pubs together.
There, the woman alleged that Mr Adams gave her a drug and told her it was diazepam.
She said she had fallen asleep only to wake to find Mr Adams sexually assaulting her. She alleged she had then fallen asleep again and awoke with her clothes removed.
Advocate Estelle Burns, defending, argued that the interaction had, in fact, been consensual – but that the woman lied about it in the morning in order to calm her partner.
She argued that the drug was not diazepam, but the opioid-substitute Subutex.
On Monday, the advocate told the court: “In Mr Adams’s interview with the police, he says that [the woman] consented to all sexual activity between them and that she made up this allegation.
“We say she made up an allegation of rape because she did not want to admit, she was scared to admit, that she had consensual activity with another man.”
Commissioner Alan Binnington was presiding.
