Rotherham sex abuse trial: Drunk girl ‘woke up to find herself being sexually assaulted in female defendant’s home’

The complainant, who cannot be named, told Sheffield Crown Court the attack happened when she was around 15 or 16 years old in the late 1980s in the Rawmarsh home of Karen MacGregor.

MacGregor, 58, of Barnsley Road, Wath, denies one count of conspiracy to rape in relation to the complainant, who is one of 12 women who have made allegations of being victims of sexual exploitation in a trial involving seven defendants.

In a video interview played to the jury, the complainant said she had been assaulted after being given several glasses of vodka to drink during a night when about six men had been in attendance at the property.

She said MacGregor and ‘a Pakistani male’ who she did not know carried her up to bed after she had a lot to drink.

The complainant said: “I must have passed out. When I woke up I had got no trousers on and a male was touching me down below. I shouted ‘Help’ twice really loud. Nobody came upstairs.”

She said the man who attacked her was bearded and had ‘two right big gold rings’ on his right hand which had hurt her when he touched her.

The complainant said the attack stopped once she woke up and started shouting.

“I must have scared him because he ran down the stairs, he just ran off and he shut the bedroom door behind him,” she said.

She said MacGregor had been ‘like a second mother’ to her after allowing her to stay in her house following the complainant moving out of her parents’ home.

But she added: “It turned out I was totally wrong.

“She must have known why I was shouting out, why couldn’t she come upstairs if she cared for me that much?”

Robert Wyn Jones, representing MacGregor, said his client denies the alleged incident ever happened.

He told the complainant: “Her recollection was there was no occasion that she had to help you up upstairs while you were drunk. She knows nothing about a sexual assault but then you didn’t say she did.”

Under cross examination, the complainant accepted she had not mentioned the allegation to anyone before this year and had spoken to police after hearing MacGregor had been charged in relation to historic child sexual exploitation offences.

She accepted she was not sure of the date of the incident and how old she was at the time. The trial continues.