Football star accused of sex attack
A MACCLESFIELD Town footballer has gone on trial accused of sexually assaulting a woman after a night out.
Striker Tyrone Marsh, 25, has appeared in court charged with two counts of sexual assault.
Both are alleged to have taken place on the same day in 2017 after Mr Marsh met the woman, who was previously unknown to him, at a bar in Wilmslow. He denies the charges. A jury at Chester Crown Court heard that the allegations had arisen after the woman, who told the court she became very intoxicated through alcohol through the course of the evening, woke up at Mr Marsh’s house in Macclesfield.
Mr Marsh, of Chelford Road, Macclesfield, has played for Macclesfield Town since the summer of 2017 and scored his first goal of the season in the Silkmen’s 2-1 League 2 defeat to Swindon last Saturday.
Sarah Morgan, prosecuting, said that the woman had drunk gin and tonics at a friend’s home before the two of them went to two bars in Wilmslow.
Miss Morgan said: “The two of them arrived at the [second] bar at around 11pm and later started to dance near the bar.
“The defendant and his friend approached them and the woman recalls the defendant saying words to the effect as to whether she was interested in him.
“When she said no he asked ‘are you only into white guys?’.”
Miss Morgan said the woman became increasingly more intoxicated and later recalled being outside the bar at closing time and then, a short time later, in a car driven by Mr Marsh, with his friend and her friend. After being taken to the defendant’s home, the woman alleged she was later sexually assaulted in the bedroom of the house by Mr Marsh.
Miss Morgan asserted that the alleged victim ‘did not consent to sexual activity and was incapable of doing so due to her level of intoxication’.
The court heard that when the woman woke up, at around 5.25am she was alone, still wearing her dress but was without some of her underwear.
Miss Morgan said the woman, who did not know where she was, tried to leave the house but found the doors locked.
She then climbed through a conservatory window into the back garden before being let back in and let out through the front door by the defendant’s friend.
The court heard she then texted a friend saying she thought she had been sexually assaulted and then called her mother who collected her and described her as ‘distressed, crying and very confused’.
The alleged victim was called as a witness, speaking to the advocates, judge and jury from behind screens.
She said that around the 3am closing time of the bar, during the journey to Macclesfield and the time at Mr Marsh’s house she said she was ‘nine or ten’ drunk on a scale of one to 10. She said that although there were significant gaps in her memory of that evening, she clearly remembered being assaulted, that ‘it hurt physically and emotionally’ and that ‘it was not a situation I wanted to be in’.
“When I woke up in the bedroom it was the worst panic I’ve ever felt in my life,” she said. PROCEEDING