Cleared, executive accused of raping ‘8 out of 10’ drunk City worker
A SCOT accused of raping a young City worker after an all-day drinking binge has walked free from court after being cleared of the charge.
Privately-educated William Paton, 30, was cleared of assaulting the 26-year-old, who said she had been an ‘eight out of ten’ drunk, in his hotel room at a Holiday Inn in Whitechapel, East London.
The Crown Prosecution Service yesterday told Blackfriars Crown Court in the City they would not be seeking a retrial after a jury failed to reach a verdict earlier this month.
The woman accused Mr Paton of raping her after they met as she enjoyed an all-day celebration with colleagues on March 4 last year.
Mr Paton, who attended the £12,000a-year Hutcheson’s Grammar School in Glasgow and the University of Strathclyde, claimed the woman consented.
The mathematics graduate denied one count of rape during the one-week trial. Mr Paton 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, starting on cranberry juice at noon before progressing to double brandy and cola, plus wine.
She said: ‘I know what I get like when I start too early.’
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.’
Mr Paton says the woman was happily dancing with him and also embraced him, but the woman insisted she had no memory of the defendant.
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.’
Mr Paton, who works for his family’s nationwide taxi insurance and maintenance company, also said he could not remember the evening clearly.
During the trial, 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.’
Prosecutor Jonathan Loades told the jury that after the lunchtime celebration the woman continued drinking at The Dickens Inn, near Tower Bridge, then met Mr Paton at The Dirty Martini in Bishopsgate, Central London.
She told the jury she regretted not catching the train opposite the bar and returning home to her longterm boyfriend.
The pair continued partying at White’s strip club in Aldgate before going to Paton’s hotel, where they were filmed on CCTV.
Mr Paton was arrested three days later outside his family’s £400,000 house by four waiting police officers. He was questioned in Scotland and DNA linked him with the woman.