Student homes predator raped Tinder girl, 20
Creep who ignored victim’s pleas facing jail
A STUDENT “ambassador” who boasted he was going to have sex with 100 women at his university has been convicted of rape. Duncan Burns was supposed to help vulnerable students as an accommodation liaison officer at Stirling University. But a jury heard evidence he was a sexual predator who forced himself on a 20-year-old student after meeting her on Tinder. The woman admitted she had gone back to Burns’s room willingly a number of times and had wanted a relationship with him. But she consistently refused his demands to have sex with him – and told him “No” repeatedly as he finally forced himself on her. Speaking through tears, the woman, who had never had a boyfriend, said: “I always perceived rape to be more like with a stranger or with violence. “I knew I’d said no and he knew I was saying no. I had no doubts in my mind, but I don’t think at the time I knew it was rape.” The jury at the High Court in Livingston heard evidence that another woman who also had sex with Burns went to the police with an almost identical account of being abused physically, verbally and sexually before being raped.
But they found him not guilty by a majority verdict of twice raping the second woman.
The first woman, now 22, told the court she was “shy” and “scared” about relationships.
She added that “cocky” Burns would drive her to tears with his insults.
Asked by defence counsel Mark Stewart if she was pressing Burns to have a relationship with her, she replied: “Sometimes he would say he wanted to sleep with 100 women and then he would commit to me.”
He also told her that when she was famous and on the television, he would say: “Oh, I took her virginity.”
Of the rape, she said: “I remember it hurting and I told him that it was hurting. He didn’t stop. It didn’t change anything. He just carried on.”
The jury heard the woman was in a “distressed state” when she told friends and university officials what Burns had done.
Burns, 24, of Birkhill, Angus, had lodged special defences claiming any sexual contact was with the women’s consent.
Adjourning sentence until November 29, judge Lord Mulholland told Burns: “You had sexual intercourse without her consent despite her making it plain to you she didn’t want sex with you.
“You ignored her wishes and used force to have sexual intercourse with her without her consent.”