Couple face jail for sex attacks on schoolboy 30 years ago
‘I fell in love with her. I felt safe with her’ ‘Her actions were unacceptable’
A WORLD-renowned harpist who has played for the Queen is facing jail along with her former partner after they were found guilty of sexually abusing a schoolboy in the 1980s.
Danielle Perrett, 59, took the virginity of the 14-year-old boy in her London flat after her then-fiance Richard Barton-Wood had taken him to see her play in a recital.
Perrett, who has performed for four prime ministers and at the Duke of Edinburgh’s 70th birthday celebrations, also abused the boy in a Transit van while Barton-Wood drove.
The four-week trial heard that Barton-Wood, 68, who was a supply English teacher at the teenager’s school, sexually assaulted him on sailing and camping trips in Germany and Holland.
Perrett shook her head yesterday as jurors at Ipswich Crown Court found her guilty of six counts of indecent assault. Barton-Wood, a Cambridge history graduate and former church warden, looked down as he was convicted of seven counts of indecent assault and one count of attempted indecent assault.
The defendants’ family and friends wept in the public gallery as Judge Rupert Overbury said the pair faced jail sentences. He added: ‘I make no bones about this at all. The sentence which you’re facing is prison and the length of that sentence will depend on further information. These are serious sexual offences.’
Sally Hickling, from the Crown Prosecution Service, said after the hearing: ‘Barton-Wood and Perrett both individually preyed on a schoolboy more than 30 years ago, and, despite the passage of time, have been convicted of sexually abusing him.
‘Danielle Perrett had sex on several occasions with the boy. This was not intercourse between consenting adults but sexual abuse by an adult on a teenage boy who was too young to give proper consent. We would like to thank the victim for giving evidence against two people who abused him as a teenager and hope he can take some comfort from the verdicts.’
The victim, who cannot be named, told the court that twice-married Perrett took his virginity in 1984 when he was 14 and she was 26. He described the experience as ‘absolutely brilliant’. He said: ‘It was just me and Danielle in that bedroom and she was cuddling me, which I can remember being my first time... a naked lady who was a lot older than myself and I found extremely attractive.
‘She smelt of roses, she always did, she was very slim, pretty. We had sex, I slept in her big bed, she was cuddling me again and we had sex. She was on top of me. I fell in love with her. I felt safe with her.’
The court heard that Barton-Wood, of Wymondham, Norfolk, joined them in bed later that night.
The victim said: ‘We were drifting off to sleep, when [he] walked into the bedroom and climbed into the bed on my right-hand side. He cuddled me and [touched me], which I hated, absolutely hated.’
The victim told jurors he later used to tie a cord around his trousers to stop Barton-Wood pulling them down to assault him, saying: ‘I used it to pull my trousers up tight. I knew if I knotted them real tight he would not be able to get into my trousers, but he tried.’
Jurors heard that Perrett, a devout Christian, performed a sex act on the boy in her shower and abused him in a Transit van while the trio drove to Barton-Wood’s home the next day. There she performed a sex act on the boy in a bath and in a barn after picking apples in the gar- den. Prosecutor William Carter told the court: ‘[The victim] was obviously too young to consent to what was happening. Her actions, pleasant though they seemed to him at the time, were unacceptable.’
Sallie Bennett-Jenkins, defending Perrett, had said of the victim’s claims: ‘There is not a drop of truth in this; this is the product of an overactive teenage imagination.’
Both defendants claimed the allegations were a ‘complete fabrication’ invented to blackmail them for money. Perrett, of Alpheton, Suffolk, claimed it was the boy who tried to attack her while she was in the shower at her flat. She said she slept in the same bed as the victim because she was ‘bitterly cold’ and that he then forced himself on her the following morning.
Perrett said she broke off her engagement to Barton-Wood after he brought the teenager round to her flat. The jury heard she was furious and ‘it was the straw that broke the camel’s back’.
Perrett later wed a composer, in 1995. Barton-Wood married in 1987 and the couple have a grown-up son.
Both defendants will now be required to register as sex offenders. They were bailed to return to the court for sentence in the week commencing February 26.