Police pay out to victim of rape

A WOMAN who was gang-raped in Plymouth by men claiming to be Welsh rugby players has sued the police for naming her online.

Devon and Cornwall Police has now agreed to pay a six-figure sum in costs and damages.

The woman was 17 years old when she was raped in a hotel in 1978. She reported the ordeal in 1993 but said officers breached her legal right to anonymity as the victim of a sexual offence when they reopened the case in 2015.

Her identity was revealed online when police published her details on an unsecured website in the hope of tracking down officers involved in the original 1993 inquiry when it was reinvestigated in 2015.

The woman said she had been reluctant to re-report the rapes – which took place at the Strathmore hotel in Elliot Street, Plymouth – but was encouraged to do so and a new investigation was launched. Trying to track down the officers involved in the 1993 investigation, detectives in the second investigation arranged to have details of her rapes, including her name and address, published on an unsecure website for retired police officers and staff. She said she was unaware she had been identified on the website and was later able to get into the website herself.

In 2017 senior detectives visited the woman at her home and told her about the publication which led to her telling her family about the ordeal. She explained she felt forced to disclose her rapes to her family as her anonymity had been breached.

The woman reported that she was repeatedly sexually assaulted as a teenager after she had been taken to the now-closed hotel.

She told police the suspects may have been members of a visiting rugby team from Wales. Cold case investigators revealed in 2020 that in 2015 they had relaunched their inquiries into the allegations, with the aim of tracing two key witnesses.

She said during her account of events that she met a man and agreed to go to his hotel with him. Once there, she had consensual sex with the man who said he was a maths teacher and part of a touring rugby team from Wales.

There was a knock on the door and more than ten men forced their way into the room before six or seven of them raped her. Nobody has ever been prosecuted for the rapes and the investigation is ongoing to this day.

Devon and Cornwall Police’s legal team confirmed the force admitted liability for misuse of the woman’s private information, breach of confidence and for breaching her rights under the Data Protection Act by placing her identifying details on the website.