Solicitor: ‘My client was silly and stupid’
else am I going to be a sl*t with?”
The boy’s mother found the card in her son’s bedroom and turned detective to find out the identity of the ‘older lady’ her son had admitted he was seeing.
She was shocked to find out it was Ms Lowe, a teacher she had got to know quite well. She claimed she found the card in her son’s bedroom when her son was a pupil but Ms Lowe’s defence claimed it must have been a year later.
The police were called and Ms Lowe was arrested.
She didn’t help herself when she told officers she had not seen the teenager for quite some time – actually she taken him to the tattoo studio just the week earlier. She told the jury she had simply panicked.
On the witness stand during the trial, she admitted she had had sex with the teenager about half-a-dozen times at her flat and in her caravan.
Describing their first sexual encounter, she said: “He said he missed me. He had been thinking about me a lot and then we kissed. And I am very embarrassed to say that we ended up in bed together, which I regret.”
She continued: “I’m mortified. I’m embarrassed. I think I was having some sort of midlife crisis. I have never done anything like that before. I don’t know why I did it. I am so ashamed.” DEBORAH Lowe’s defence was helped by glowing character references, particularly from Manchester City where she worked on matchdays as a senior manager in corporate hospitality at the Etihad stadium.
The jurors heard she had paid £150 out of her own pocket for counselling for one pupil who had been sexually abused.
In his closing speech, Neil Usher, defending, said that ‘happily’ for his client there wasn’t another charge on the indictment where she was ‘charged with the offence of being a bloody fool when going through a mid-life crisis’.
Had she faced such a charge, he said, the jurors’ task would be ‘straightforward’ and they would find ‘no difficulty’ in convicting her of being ‘silly, inappropriate and stupid’.
“The career she loved, helping kids, championing kids, and it’s all gone because of her own stupidity. She threw it all away. She’s now lost her career,” he said.
Intimate details of her relationship had been published by the newspapers and they were ‘toe-curling’ for both his client and her family, he said, although he conceded she was the author of her own downfall.
“It’s her foolishness which has placed her in this position,” he said, although he invited the jury to conclude that ‘she has been punished enough for that foolishness’.
The jury agreed and acquitted her of all charges and she is now seeking to rebuild her life away from the spotlight.