‘Rapist church leader treated me like meat’

A DEVOUT Christian sobbed yesterday as she described how a church leader treated her ‘like a piece of meat’. The young woman said she was raped and sexually assaulted by Timothy Storey, who she considered to be ‘ more influential than God’.

She met the ‘ good-looking’ aspiring vicar when she was just 13 and their relationship started as a ‘teenage crush’.

But the woman said that four years later the youth group leader was using her to meet his voracious sexual demands. Her attempts to get the Church of England to intervene failed, the court heard, even after she outlined her abuse at his hands.

Addressing the jury from behind a screen, the woman, now 25, read from a letter she wrote to senior clergy when she tried to raise the alarm. She wrote: ‘ He ground me down and treated me like a piece of meat.

‘I felt like a blow-up doll. He once said to me: “You are not worth wasting a condom on.” When he wants sex, he will not stop until he gets it. I put him on a pedestal and he knew it.’

Storey was only arrested after an article was published in the Daily Mail last May about his conviction for sexually abusing children. The woman, the daughter of a preacher, and a second woman came forward to tell police he had raped them.

Woolwich Crown Court was told how she met Storey when she visited St Michael’s Church in London, a stone’s throw from Margaret Thatcher’s former Belgravia home.

She idolised the church leader, but said his behaviour spiralled out of control after they began exchanging steamy messages, including a photograph of her breasts.

Storey even persuaded the woman to engage in phonesex conversations in which he fantasised about a threesome with her and her then 14-year-old sister. Throughout her ordeal, Storey preached ‘ no sex before marriage’ and was even responsible for training future church leaders in ‘ child protection’ at a summer camp.

Asked by prosecutor Hanna Llewellyn-Waters why she could not stop him, the woman said his role in her life was overwhelming.

‘He was the most influential voice in my life, more than my parents, more than anyone else at church, more than God,’ she said. ‘He was God. The idea of not having Tim in my life was unthinkable and I could not imagine it.

‘It was like I was trapped in a web – he had me in this spider’s web.’

The court heard Storey was studying theology at Oxford but he stopped attending the course as rumours swirled around him.

Storey, 35, of Peckham, Southeast London, is accused of raping each woman twice and of sexually assaulting the first victim. He is also accused of sexually grooming a third victim, a 13-year-old girl, on Facebook. He denies the charges.

The trial continues.

‘I felt like a blow-up doll’