Businessman is cleared of raping ‘8 out of 10 drunk’ City worker
A UNIVERSITY graduate accused of raping a young City worker after an all-day drinking binge has been cleared.
Privately- educated William Paton, 30, maintained that the 26-year-old, who said she had been ‘eight out of ten’ drunk, agreed to sex in his hotel room.
The Crown Prosecution Service yesterday told Blackfriars Crown Court in London they would not be seeking a retrial after a jury failed to reach a verdict at a trial earlier this month.
The woman accused Paton of raping her after he attended an all-day brandy and wine celebration with office colleagues on March 4 last year. Paton, who attended the £12,000 a-year Hutcheson’s Grammar School in Glasgow and the University of Strathclyde, said the woman consented.
He had travelled from his home in Newton Mearns, East Renfrewshire, to attend an event hosted by a City of London livery company – a trade association – and met the woman while out drinking afterwards.
She told the court she was ‘eight out of ten’ on a scale of total inebriation, having started on cranberry juice at noon before progressing to double brandy and Coke, plus wine. ‘I know what I get like when I start too early,’ she added.
Agreeing she was ‘binge-drinking’ that day, the woman said: ‘I think a lot of people do at my age, I don’t think I’m alone there. Before this happened and I was out I never wanted to go home. I just wanted to enjoy myself.’
Prosecutor Jonathan Loades told the jury that after a lunchtime celebration the woman continued drinking at a pub then met Paton in Bishopsgate, Central London. She said she now regrets not catching the train opposite the bar and returning home to her long-term boyfriend.
She went with Paton to a strip club before going to his hotel in Whitechapel, East London, where they were filmed on CCTV.
Mr Paton says the woman was happily dancing with him during the evening and also embraced him, but she says she has no memory of him until she woke up in his room to find him having sex with her.
She told the court: ‘The next thing I remember was being rocked and seeing someone there. I freaked out. I did not know if it was real or not and I remember crying in the toilet. I scared myself that I could drink that much.’
Mr Paton, who works for his fam- ily’s taxi insurance and maintenance company, also said he could not remember the evening clearly.
But he told the jury: ‘I would never, ever take advantage of a woman. There’s absolutely no way that I would rape any woman.
‘She didn’t wake up with me on top of her. We had consensual sex. The one thing I can remember is her getting out of bed and leaving quietly. She did not wake up having sex with me.’
Paton was arrested three days later on the front driveway of his family’s house by four waiting police officers. He was questioned in Scotland and DNA linked him with the woman. He had denied one count of rape during the oneweek trial.