Student doctor is convicted of indecent assault after he grabbed lover too hard in bed
A STUDENT doctor’s career is in tatters after he was convicted of indecent assault for squeezing a woman’s breasts during consensual sex.
Philip Queree, 37, met the woman through the dating app Tinder and they agreed to have sex at her flat after a dinner date in Gorey, Jersey.
As they made love, the victim, a healthcare worker referred to as Miss X in court, asked Queree to stop grabbing her breasts, saying it was too painful.
However, he ignored her and forcibly groped her chest twice more, a court heard. The pain left her in tears and she developed bruising on both of her breasts.
The woman, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, decided to go to the police after discussing the incident with friends and family. Queree was found guilty of indecent assault following a trial at Jersey magistrates’ court last month.
He claimed the woman had consented to every aspect of the ‘passionate’ encounter, but magistrates rejected his account.
Queree was put on the sex offender’s register for five years, told to carry out 180 hours’ of community service and ordered to pay £2,000 in prosecution costs.
David Steenson, defending, had warned that Queree’s promising medical career would be ‘substantially ruined’ in the event of a guilty verdict.
Speaking before the sentencing hearing on Monday, he added: ‘Queree is in a parlous financial state. He does not have a job. He has no savings. He has little chance of getting work in the medical field as a result of this conviction.’
The student doctor was in Jersey visiting his parents in August last year when he went out for drinks with the woman, whom he had met through the dating app Tinder.
The first date went well and the couple met again on August 19, when they had dinner and agreed to stop using Tinder and date each other exclusively. They had sex that night during which Queree, who was in his third year as a mature student studying medicine at King’s College London, was said to have ignored the woman’s pleas to stop grabbing her breasts.
Magistrate Bridget Shaw said: ‘She had given consent to sexual intercourse and therefore had impliedly given consent to her breasts being touched in a sexual manner. By her account she later specifically withdrew consent for her breasts being touched even though she continued otherwise to consent to sexual intercourse.’
She said Queree had ‘continued to grab her breasts despite the withdrawal of consent and in the knowledge that consent had been withdrawn’.
Queree was said to have become upset when the woman wanted to discuss the bruising and stormed out. She texted him asking him to come back.
He insisted everything they did that night was consensual. He claimed she did not tell him not to touch her chest – although she did at one stage ask him, in non- specific terms, to be more gentle, to which he complied.
In his police interview, Queree said they were both excited as it was their first sexual encounter and the woman appeared to be enjoying herself. He suggested she might ‘bruise easily’.
In a written ruling, Mrs Shaw said: ‘Some aspects of her evidence might be thought to be illogical, specifically why she would continue to consent to sexual intercourse with a man who had hurt her and why she would plead to him to return to the flat.
‘She gave credible reasons … She felt she was falling in love with him. I find it credible that she wanted to continue sexual intercourse but she tried to put a limit on his conduct and asked him not to grab her painful breasts again.
‘I conclude that he was untruthful when he said she had not complained to him and asked him to stop touching her breasts, that nothing unusual had happened and that they had parted on good terms.’
Queree intends to appeal against the conviction.
‘Pain left her in tears’