A court has set a teenager who forcefully had s*x with an 18-year-old virgin after it had initially convicted him of the crime.
Luke Lazarus
A former public schoolboy has been set free by a court after he had been jailed for r*ping a teen virgin behind his dad’s nightclub.
According to Sun UK, the shocking ruling was delivered after a four-year court ordeal. Luke Lazarus, 25, was convicted of attacking the girl, then 18, in a Sydney alleyway just minutes after meeting her on a night out in 2013. But in April last year a court scrapped his three year prison sentence, which was doled out in 2015.
His retrial, which concluded on Thursday, found that the pair's anal sex was consensual.
Judge Robyn Tupman said that while the encounter was "quick and unromantic... there were no reasonable grounds for believing the complainant was not consenting".
Lazarus met the woman, who cannot be named, on the dance floor of the Soho club in the city's Kings Cross hotspot in May 2013.
He boasted of being part-owner of his dad's club and offered to take her to the VIP area, the court heard. The pair left through a back door at about 4am, around three minutes after they first met. But after Lazarus made a comment about the girl being "tight" they tried anal s*x, the court heard.
Lazarus pictured in April 2016 after his three-year prison sentence was scrapped. A retrial has now completely cleared him of wrongdoing
Lazarus told the teen he would add her to his "trophy list" and later boasted to a friend that he "took a chick's virginity".
The woman alleged that she had told him to stop after they first started kissing in the alleyway, but he demanded she put her hands on the wall. She also claimed that he told her to get on all fours and that when they began having s*x she told him to stop again.
But ruling after the retrial, which was carried out without a jury, Judge Tupman said her story was unreliable due to inconsistencies.
Repentful Lazarus said that after their encounter he realised the "selfish, thoughtless, inconsiderate thing I had done".
Phillip Boulten, SC, defending, said: "The events in the back laneway were likely to be a matter of almost immediate regret and confusion for the complainant and for the accused."