Nine men have gone on trial accused of being involved in the abuse of a woman who was drugged, raped and sexually assaulted by her husband while he \u201clived a double life masked in respectability\u201d.<\/p>\n
The husband, who cannot be named in order to protect the anonymity of his victim, has already pleaded guilty to a number of offences against his wife spanning more than two decades.<\/p>\n
The offences involving the nine men on trial, who the prosecution say \u201cwere [also] leading double lives\u201d, are alleged to have taken place between 2015 and the husband\u2019s arrest in 2025.<\/p>\n
Two of the men, Daniel Rayner, 42, from Whitstable in Kent and David Graves, 59, from Ilkeston in Derbyshire, were described in court as \u201cnon-contact offenders\u201d, who are alleged to have encouraged the abuse online.<\/p>\n
The other seven were described as \u201ccontact offenders\u201d, who are alleged to have visited the couple\u2019s home in Stockport, Greater Manchester, and participated in the abuse of the victim.<\/p>\n
They are Philip Wild, 58, from Stockport; Jordan Wallace, 31, from Manchester; Alan Keelan, 42, from Manchester; Jonathan Kirk, 43, from Stockport; Robert Stewart, 70, from Stockport; Mohammed Sabir, 28, of no fixed abode; and Richard Townsend, 37, from Heywood in Greater Manchester.<\/p>\n
Three other men, Sean Peers, 38, from Stockport; Keith Fotheringham, 59, from Dundee; and Graham Brougham, 74, from Northwich in Cheshire, have already admitted to abusing the woman at previous hearings at Manchester Minshull Street crown court.<\/p>\n
Last week, Karl Lindsay, 56, from Somerset also pleaded guilty to \u201cnon-contact\u201d offences at a hearing at the same court on Friday.<\/p>\n
Opening the crown\u2019s case, prosecutor Louise Oakley KC said: \u201cUnbeknownst to [the victim], for over 20 years, her husband had been abusing her sexually in a variety of ways whilst she was asleep or was unconscious.\u201d<\/p>\n
Oakley said he had done so \u201cinitially taking advantage of occasions when she had drunk enough alcohol herself to put her into a deep sleep, but also on many more occasions, more and more frequently, over that 20-year period, deliberately using a cocktail of stupefying drugs, which he administered to her without her knowledge, with or without alcohol\u201d.<\/p>\n
Oakley said that \u201cfrom 2023 onwards at the latest, though he had been talking about it for much longer, [the husband] began actively inviting other men round to their home, and, whilst his wife lay unconscious in their bed, he filmed himself and others raping and sexually abusing her\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey were well aware, the prosecution say, that [she] was not conscious, that is why they were there, to use her body whilst she was unaware, just as [her husband] had been doing over the preceding years.\u201d<\/p>\n
Oakley said the men \u201cderived sexual gratification and enjoyment from knowing\u201d that the victim was \u201cunaware\u201d or \u201cout of it\u201d.<\/p>\n
The victim \u201chad absolutely no idea it was going on\u201d, Oakley said, \u201cthat is, until the police came round to her door and identified to her that she had been the subject of the videos\u201d her husband had taken.<\/p>\n
As the prosecution set out their case in court, a relative of the victim, who was in the courtroom, cried and held their head in their hands, as they were comforted by two companions.<\/p>\n
Oakley said that while during the course of the trial it maybe be suggested that the victim was \u201cin fact only pretending to be asleep or unconscious as part of a fantasy role play with her husband \u2026 the prosecution says that is a smokescreen\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat these men did\u201d, Oakley said, \u201cwas not participation in unconventional, but consensual sexual practices: in this case it was rape and sexual assault, pure and simple.\u201d<\/p>\n
The court heard that the husband\u2019s offending was discovered after undercover journalists infiltrated a chat on the Telegram messaging platform. He was arrested and his mobile phone was seized.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat telephone was like a confession booth,\u201d Oakley said, adding that it \u201ccontained decades\u2019 worth of material\u201d from other devices and cameras.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat description cannot be underestimated,\u201d she said. \u201cIt contained [the husband\u2019s] darkest secrets and the barbaric sexual fantasies that he had sought to fulfil going back in time to 2004.\u201d<\/p>\n
She said the mobile phone contained \u201cover a million photographs and videos, cataloguing not only his abuse of [his wife] but abuse committed by others on her, including those in the dock today\u201d.<\/p>\n
Oakley said the husband had \u201clived a double life masked in respectability\u201d and that the nine men on trial were also \u201cleading double lives\u201d.<\/p>\n
They were, she said, \u201ceither creeping in and out of [the marital home] in the hours of darkness, quietly and carefully so that they weren\u2019t seen or heard, or hiding behind the screens of their mobile telephones and computers. No doubt believing they were safe.\u201d<\/p>\n
The men deny all of the charges against them. The trial at Minshull Street crown court continues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nine men have gone on trial accused of being involved in the abuse of a woman who was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":822103,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-822102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=822102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822102\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/822103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=822102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=822102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=822102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}