Army chaplain cleared of raping parishioner at abbey
AN ARMY chaplain and priest who was accused of raping a parishioner and leaving her pregnant has been cleared of wrongdoing after a church court dismissed allegations that they had had a sexual relationship.
The woman said the Rev Timothy Blewett had “forced himself upon her and had sexual intercourse with her” in the woods at Launde Abbey, a Christian retreat where he was warden at the time. The married woman said she became pregnant but later miscarried.
The Bishop’s Disciplinary Tribunal in the diocese of Leicester ruled that it was “not satisfied on the balance of probabilities, that the respondent had an improper sexual relationship” with the woman. However, a spokesman said that despite being cleared Mr Blewett, who has toured Bosnia and Iraq with the Territorial Army, was still barred from officiating in the diocese.
The allegation was first reported to police after a “third party” contacted officers in 2014, but the complainant “did not disclose any criminal offence and there was no further police action”, said Judge Philip Waller.
The pair met when the woman visited the abbey on a retreat in November 2011, and Mr Blewett became her “spiritual director”. They met again several times in 2012.
On one occasion, the woman told the court, the pair went for a walk in the grounds of the Abbey, and “lay together in the woods and kissed passionately”. She said Mr Blewett then pulled down her trousers and pants and had sexual intercourse with her, which she had not wanted.
Despite taking the morning-after pill she became pregnant, she claimed, and knew the child could not be her husband’s “as he was unable to ejaculate”.
Mr Blewett said the incident in the woods did not take place, as he had been with his Army unit in the Welsh borders that weekend, and produced a payslip showing this.
A court judgment found that “the complainant has not discharged the burden of proving the allegation of sexual impropriety on the part of the respondent”. However, Mr Blewett “did not take sufficient account” of the “vulnerability” of the woman, it said, and entered into “a degree of friendship beyond spiritual direction”.
Mr Blewett declined to comment when contacted yesterday.
In an interview with the Church Times in 2010, he spoke of the three children he has with his wife, Anne, and how difficult it was for them when he was in Iraq in 2003-4. “I’d like to be locked in a church with my family,” he said. “Because I’m a workaholic and have a wonderful, all-consuming job, I probably don’t spend as much time as I should enjoying them.”