‘Naughty Tory groped me in a scary night at his home’
A WOMAN wept in court as she recalled the ‘odd and scary’ night former MP Charlie Elphicke allegedly groped and chased her round his family home chanting: ‘I’m a naughty Tory.’
The alleged victim, in her early 30s at the time, said she had rejected his advances moments earlier after they shared a bottle of £40 wine in his central London home, as his children slept upstairs and his wife Natalie was away on business in 2007.
Giving evidence via videolink, the woman said she thought of Elphicke, then 36, as ‘asexual’ and found it ‘odd’ when he allegedly asked about sexual preferences, including bondage.
‘He was jovial, jokey, excited maybe, in an animated way,’ she said. ‘I was just thinking “Oh God, how embarrassing”.’
She told Southwark crown court ‘a couple of sentences’ later he ‘jumped’ on her.
‘He tried to kiss me and I moved my head. He pushed me down by my shoulders, he had his knee between my legs and he was groping my breast,’ she said. The woman told jurors she was shocked and pushed Elphicke away before he ‘pursued’ her around his home.
‘He was saying really bizarre things that are embarrassing, like “I’m a naughty Tory”,’ she said. ‘He was trying to grope me and trying to grab my bum. He was following me, it was like a race.’
The witness, who it is said was later offered £30,000 by the Daily Mirror for her story, told jurors she managed to get away from Elphicke and got into a taxi. ‘The whole thing was really embarrassing and odd and scary,’ she said. Ian Winter QC, defending, accused the witness of inconsistencies in her evidence and said the phrase ‘naughty Tory’ entered her account after reports a decade later of a so-called ‘naughty Tory list’.
She denied this, along with a suggestion Elphicke ‘immediately stopped’ kissing her when she asked him to and that the incident ended there.
Jurors have been told of a second woman, a parliamentary worker in her early 20s, who alleges Elphicke tried to kiss and grope her. Elphicke, 49, was MP for Dover from 2010 until last year’s general election when his wife succeeded him. He denies three counts of sexual assault against two women from 2007 to 2016. The trial continues.