‘Playboy butcher’ cleared of date raping niece of pop superstar
A ‘ PLAYBOY butcher’ accused the niece of a music superstar of trying to use her uncle’s fame to frame him after he was cleared of raping her yesterday. Matthew Thomas had been charged with drugging and raping the married mother, 47, three times in her own home while her young son was asleep in the next room. The woman claimed she went to police days after the attack in September 2008, but was told to drop the case by an officer who allegedly warned her name would be ‘splashed’ across the papers due to her famous uncle. When she made an official police complaint six years later in 2014, in which she accused Mr Thomas of putting the date rape drug Rohypnol in her red wine, the organic meat butcher told detectives he had had consensual sex with the woman.
He also said that the woman, who cannot be named, invited him to her home where she gossiped about her uncle, saying he was ‘tight’ and never sent her any Christmas or birthday cards, before leading him into the bedroom where they had sex.
Yesterday a jury at Lewes Crown Court took just over an hour to clear the butcher of all charges after a four-day trial.
During the proceedings, it was revealed that no record of the police ‘intel report’ the woman claimed she made in 2008 was found and the female officer who allegedly advised
‘Made her uncle a big thing’
her to drop the case could not be traced.
Afterwards, the divorced father, 52, claimed the woman had tried to use her famous uncle to bolster her allegations, fooling the jury into thinking that she had a reason for not going to police at the time.
On the steps of the court Mr Thomas, nicknamed the ‘playboy butcher’ by his former girlfriends, said: ‘The prosecution tried to make a big thing about her famous uncle but he didn’t have anything to do with the case – it was of no real relevance.
‘She told me early on about her famous relative and paraded her son in front of me and said about how he looks a lot like her uncle.
‘I think she was trying to justify what was a made-up manufactured story.
‘She thought it added weight to her story but it probably was actually damaging.’