Sergeant told me I ‘screamed like a girl’ as spider was thrown at me, claims gay Pc
A POLICE officer faces ruin after telling a colleague he ‘screamed like a little girl’ when a spider was flicked at him.
Sergeant Mark Goodenough, 42, teased a young gay constable over his reaction when the spider went flying through the air.
His junior colleague Pc Aaron Prayter, 28, claimed he was accused of screaming in a high- pitched voice over the incident involving a false widow spider, which has a notoriously nasty bite.
Pc Prayter, an outspoken campaigner on gay rights, complained to superiors that he was left ‘angry and embarrassed’.
But the alleged victim also admitted to having openly described himself as a ‘screaming queen’.
Now, almost three years later, Sergeant Goodenough is facing a misconduct panel of senior officers over his comments. The panel could order his dismissal.
Under rules which were introduced only weeks ago, the hearing is being held in public, offering a new insight into police disciplinary procedures.
The Met sergeant faces several claims, including that he referred to the ‘HIV diet’ in a remark on Pc Prayter’s slim build, and mentioned a ‘gay clique’.
He faces further claims of saying ‘what a gay’ about someone who hurt his finger and labelled another officer as ‘ the short lesbian’.
He is also said to have remarked ‘I don’t want another one of your lot’ after hearing another gay officer would join his team.
And he is alleged to have said to a fat police officer: ‘How the hell have you got yourself a girl- friend?’ The spider incident took place in late 2012 when officers discovered it ‘crawling down an intercom’ at a block of flats.
A third unidentified officer flicked the spider at Pc Prayter and the story of his reaction quickly spread among other colleagues.
Ben Summers, who represents Sergeant Goodenough, said his client accepts he ‘may have said he’d heard you had screamed like a little girl’.
But he said that if he had used this phrase it was ‘as a description, without malice’. He added: ‘It’s being used as a simile.’
Pc Prayter replied: ‘He said it in a way which, I believed, was to try to bully me and humiliate me.’
Asked by the misconduct panel’s chairman, Commander Julian Bennett, whether the spider was a plastic toy, Pc Prayter said: ‘ No. It’s a real species of spider.’
The panel heard that the junior officer had joked about the spider in the immediate aftermath of the incident.
Pc Prayter denied screaming when the spider was flicked at him, saying he had merely moved out of its way.
The panel was told that he took the remark as ‘an insinuation that he was camp’.
Another openly gay officer, Pc Nikki Hardy, said Sergeant Goodenough was an ‘intrusive’ and proactive supervisor but she did not believe he was homophobic.
Any remarks he might have made about other gay officers joining the team would have been ‘banter’, she said, adding: ‘I didn’t feel aggrieved by him.’
Sergeant Goodenough joined the Met in 1992 and now leads a response team of 12 officers in Waltham Forest, Essex. He denies making homophobic comments.
The hearing continues.
‘Trying to bully and humiliate me’