Aristocrat aged 41 admits sex with alleged rape victim, 16

A SCOTTISH aristocrat accused of raping a teenage girl had been having a sexual relationship with her for more than a week, a court has heard.

The Honourable James Murray, 41, the son of the Earl of Mansfield, told police he had had sex with the alleged victim “up to half-a-dozen” times in the eight or nine days before the attack is said to have taken place.

Oxford Crown Court has been told that Old Etonian Murray carried out the rape in June 2010 after getting the 16-year-old girl drunk on vodka.

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She was one of a group of teenage friends who used to visit his Oxford flat to drink, smoke, play on his laptop and listen to music, the court has heard.

In a police interview read to the jury, Murray, who grew up in Scone Palace, Perthshire, said he had been trying to “engage” with youngsters who gathered outside his house because there had been security problems with bicycles and post going missing.

Some of the young people, because he lived in a ground floor flat, directed their attention at him, he told police. He developed a “soft spot” for the alleged victim and felt he was offering her a “safe haven” from her home life.

For about a week or ten days before the alleged attack, the girl started sleeping at his house every night. He said sex began after she had made “suggestive” noises to him on the phone. She had not seemed very interested in contraception, but he used a condom.

Murray also told police the girl offered him sex in return for alcohol and cigarettes, but stressed: “I refused to have, sort of, any sort of feelings for her when she was 15 because it’s not right. I wasn’t prepared to go down that road.”

The girl told officers she awoke on a leopard-print inflatable mattress in Murray’s spare room with her trousers around her knees, while he was lying next to her naked, on 26 June last year.

The teenager said she later met friends near Murray’s flat and wept as she described how he told her he had had sex with her as she slept, but the condom had split and she needed to take the morning-after pill.

They then confronted him, demanding he delete their phone numbers from his iPhone. The court heard how over the course of the day, Murray bombarded the girl with text messages, including one apologising 21 times and another which said: “If you call the police and cry rape and that I spiked your Ribena, then our friendship will be over.”

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The defendant hung his head as transcripts of the interview he gave to police the day after the alleged incident were read out in court.

Earlier, the jury had heard from a friend of the alleged victim who said the teenager and Murray were “just friends”. The witness said: “I asked her, ‘Do you fancy him?’, she replied ‘No, we are just friends’.”

The day after the attack, the girl was upset and crying and told friends that Murray kept offering her drinks with alcohol, but she was only drinking Ribena and Coke. “She woke up the next morning with him naked next to her,” the witness said.

A toxicology report found no evidence of recently consumed alcohol in the alleged victim’s urine sample but the expert warned that, as it was provided 19 hours after she went to bed, a considerable amount of alcohol could have been eliminated in that time.

Murray, a computer engineer, denies one count of rape at his former home in Oxford’s Water Eaton Road. The trial continues.

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