City trader ‘groped woman in queue for after-work drinks’
A CITY trader slipped his hand inside a woman’s dress and groped her as she queued at a packed bar, a court heard.
Jamie Atkins, 39, is also accused of knocking a fellow drinker ‘out cold’ on the floor after he intervened.
The alleged victim said she was assaulted as she waited to buy a round of drinks for colleagues at a trendy bar near Liverpool Street station in London.
She said was chatting to a stranger as she tried to catch the attention of bar staff at The Botanist in Broadgate Circle last September when she felt a hand slide across her body and inside a slit in the front of her dress.
She told Southwark Crown Court yesterday: ‘Out of nowhere a man, the defendant, came from behind me across my right shoulder.
‘I heard him mumble or say something and he just reached in and grabbed between my legs on my crotch.’
She said she went cold before slapping Atkins across the face to ‘get him off’ and draw attention to what had happened.
After seeing the slap, the second man remonstrated with ‘ bleary, stumbling’ Atkins, who is then said to have knocked him out.
The woman added: ‘My attention was on the barman and as he moved away I was aware of the smaller man intervening and speaking to the defendant but I couldn’t hear what was going on. Then I heard a large thud and the man was out cold on the ground.’
A jury heard that Atkins, a commodities trader, claims to have merely touched the woman’s hip innocently before hitting the other man in self- defence. She and a group of colleagues had been at the bar for half an hour when she was allegedly assaulted.
The woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was in a black dress with a slit from her left hip to a few inches above her right knee, on top of an underskirt.
She said: ‘His hand actually went in between the slit when he grabbed me. He grabbed my crotch – as I recall on the underskirt but under the main material of the dress. He came out of absolutely nowhere and grabbed me.
‘I hadn’t been talking to him, I hadn’t even made eye contact.’
She insisted it could not have been an innocent mistake, adding: ‘I remember feeling the man’s two or three fingers on my crotch.
‘The difference between your hip, which you would have to grab with the palm of your hand compared to fingers pressed on the most intimate part of your body, is just completely different, and that is what I felt on that night.
‘He grabbed my crotch in a deliberate manner and squeezed it.’
Atkins, of Hornchurch, Essex, denies sexual assault and assault by beating. The trial continues.
‘He came out of nowhere’