In court
Pervert jailed for 13 years

A PERVERT who sexually abused a young Rugby girl whose mother he had met through an online dating site has been jailed for a total of 13 years.

Barry Giles, 39, of Station Road, Woodford Halse, near Daventry, had pleaded not guilty at Warwick Crown Court to sexual assault and three charges of assault by penetration.

But after hearing that one unusual act was something he had also done to his ex-wife, who he had cheated on with a 14-year-old girl, the jury took just an hour to convict him of all four charges.

Following the unanimous verdicts at the end of the trial in October, Judge Trevor Faber had adjourned the case for a pre-sentence report to be prepared.

And on Friday at Coventry Crown Court, where he was then sitting, Judge Faber jailed Giles for 13 years and ordered him to register as a sex offender for life.

During the trial prosecutor Simon Ward said Giles had met the girl’s mother, who lives in Rugby, through an online dating site.

But last year the girl revealed that on occasions when Giles was at her home and her mother had gone out, trusting him to look after her when she was just 11, he had in fact sexually abused her.

Mr Ward explained police had discovered Giles had also had an illicit sexual relationship with a 13-year-old girl when he was aged 23 in the late 1990s.

He was then married and living in the south of England at the time. When his wife found out about that girl, who he had met on a camping holiday, she left him, and his relationship with the girl continued until they split up when she was 16.

Jailing Giles, Judge Faber also barred him from ever working with children on a paid or voluntary basis and imposed a sexual offences prevention order under which he is prevented from having any unsupervised contact with children.