Odey cleared as judge says woman’s evidence might have been inspired by the MeToo movement

Multi millionaire hedge fund manager Crispin Odey  denied thrusting his hand up a young investment banker’s skirt and said it was ‘unnatural’ that she still feels angry about the incident.

Odey, 62, allegedly indecently assaulted the 26-year-old woman at his Chelsea home in July 1998 when he was 39.

The arch Brexiteer, who donated £10,000 to Boris Johnson’s leadership campaign, is said to have ‘launched himself’ at the complainant.

She asked him ‘when is this going to end’ and he replied: ‘This is going to end up in bed hopefully’, the court has heard.

The woman reported what had happened to her bank a year later after claiming she was assaulted at a corporate day out at the Rugby World Cup in Cardiff, but her employers ‘did not take it particularly seriously’.

Oxford-educated former barrister entered the dock at Westminster Magistrates’ Court to give evidence after a three-week break in the trial which began last month.

Giving evidence in a light blue shirt, dark blue tie and grey suit and clutching a black notebook, he said he would ‘love’ to swear an oath on the bible when offered the choice by district judge Nicholas Rimmer.

 

 

‘The bible will be cleaned in due course,’ said the judge.

Once he had sat down, after asking for a cushion, Odey, who lives in a £7.75m house in Chelsea, described his confusion over the complainant’s ‘anger’.

Odey said: ‘I think one of the most unnatural things is how long she has felt angry.’

Prosecutor Kerry Broome said: ‘Well it’s natural if you put her hands up her skirt and down her top having invited her under false pretences.’

‘It’s still very unusual,’ he replied.

Ms Broome asked: ‘Would it explain the anger 15 years on?’

‘I don’t think so’, he said.

His wife Nichola Pease sat two metres away from the witness box in a dark blue suit over a blue and white patterned blouse, red face-mask and black heels.

She stared at her husband as he told the court he ‘probably wouldn’t have bothered’ to let her know he was meeting the woman.

Odey said: ‘She came to a meeting in my office on 12 Upper Grosvenor Street in Mayfair with somebody else, she appeared to be interesting in everything that was being said.

‘She was attractive, she was clever.

‘The next morning I rang her up entirely on a social basis to say why don’t you come round for dinner and we agreed to go for dinner on the Thursday. I gave her my address and telephone number.

‘I invited her because I thought we would have an entertaining interesting evening.

‘I saw this as a social evening and frankly it was very early on in the evening. It was chit-chat.’

When asked by his barrister Crispin Aylett QC if he wanted to be ‘intimate’ with her, he replied: ‘It might have been in the back of my mind but not in the front of my mind. It was probably at the back of my mind.

‘Nichola wasn’t at home we had two children at that stage. Nicola worked three days a week.’

Describing his recollection of the evening, he said: ‘We were talking away and she suddenly said to me why are you being so nice to me and where do you think this is all going to end and I’m ashamed to say well if I’m lucky it might end in bed.

‘Her reaction was she immediately became very angry. Obviously it was the last thing she had expected me to say. I totally misunderstood her question and she got up and I tried to apologise and she we walked down in silence downstairs to the door and I let her out.

‘What makes me remember this evening was very seldom has somebody left before dinner that’s what I remember, how angry she became, how impossible it was to apologise. She left in such a manner that I will remember it forever.

‘Only two times in my life I remember people leaving before dinner is served,’ Odey said, as his wife chuckled loudly.

Odey said he called her the next day because he ‘wanted to apologise to her. I had made a pass and she took it very badly. I apologised at the time and she wouldn’t accept it.’

The woman emailed Odey in 2013, and he replied.

He said he was ‘hit by the hatred in the email I received, it was nothing like my own recollection of the evening and so my email was essentially saying I don’t understand why you have such a different recollection to mine.

‘I was also scared that Nicola might find out this was a menacing email.

‘I wasn’t trying to make a denial I was trying to conciliate her.

‘She already was planning reprisals in the first email.’

Asked whether he had told his wife, he said: ‘Again it was absolutely something I didn’t want to come out, it is deeply embarrassing and I feel sorry for Nicola.’

He looked at his wife, who nodded back at him and at the judge.

He said the ‘horrible slur with great shame’ of which he is accused caused an ‘enormous strain’ on their marriage.

Odey insisted his alleged victim ‘is exaggerating massively and said: ‘I am an innocent man’.

The hedge fund boss said the first time his wife found out about the allegation was after the complainant emailed him for a second time on 30 November 2017.

The email said: ‘I have reported you to the police for sexual assault’.

Odey, of Swan Walk, Chelsea, denies indecent assault.

Asked if he was ‘a man of influence, of power’ in the 90s, Odey replied: ‘No, I had 15 people in 1998, we ran 750 – 800 million dollars.’

Ms Broome asked: ‘You are a man of influence aren’t you?’

Odey replied: ‘Yes. I was pleased that she was interested in what one did.

‘I remember she was attractive in the meeting.’

Odey said the woman ‘led me to believe’ she was younger than she actually was because she didn’t reply to an email when he incorrectly said she was 23.

‘It’s just her fault again, isn’t it, it’s just her fault,’ said Ms Broome.

He said he invited her to his home because ‘I thought she could have, I thought she wanted, I thought she could have become a friend.’

Ms Broome asked why he hadn’t said he wanted friendship when the woman asked where the situation was going.

Odey replied: ‘I thought she was inviting something.

‘I learned one thing from her which was basically don’t invite someone for dinner who might feel obligated to accept. That’s what I learnt.

‘She admits she was like a coiled spring.

‘I don’t think she was there to talk about her career.’

Ms Broome replied: ‘So this is her fault again. She said she was like [a coiled spring] when she realised things were a little strange.’

Odey looked at his wife and said at the time his ‘oldest child would have been four and my wife was pregnant at the time.

‘I had liked what I had seen of her on the Monday and I rang her up and said why don’t we have dinner.

‘I’m embarrassed to say if she had gone along with it I would have gone further.

‘I was attracted to her. Hey, look, I tried my luck in that I asked and she gave an answer.

‘She was a young attractive girl.’

After Odey completed his evidence Ms Broome told the court: ‘The question you have to answer is whether you think she was telling the truth or could she have been exaggerating or even lying.

‘This complaint was not made to the police at the time it was made a long time later, and that brings with it challenges.

‘This comes down to the accounts of [the woman] and Crispin Odey.

‘There is a lot that is agreed in this case, we know that they ended up at the house.

‘We know there was an invitation in which he invited her to go there. He said in evidence today that he invited her for purely friendly and social reasons.

‘You heard my cross-examination of him about that particular aspect, we would say being generous to him, there were mixed motives, which I think he potentially accepted.

‘We know he was attracted to her.

‘We know something happened.

‘We know she left.

‘We know she told her boyfriend that very night.

‘We know she reported something to three colleagues the next day.

‘She made re report the following year.

‘We have the 2013 email and the 2017 email following her report to the police.

‘She felt Mr Odey had taken advantage of her.

‘Inconsistencies about one area do not mean the evidence is inconsistent in its entirety.

‘Why would she tell her colleagues about it the next day, why would she bring to the fore the fact she had been made a fool of, that makes very little sense just thinking how people behave.

‘Someone in an embarrassing situation would not necessarily bring it to the fore.

‘Mr Odey’s explanation is crafted to be as close to the truth as possible but crafted to give him a way out.

‘He was on notice, he knew the case he had to make.

‘He knew he was powerful in the city.

‘He thought the person at fault her was her.

‘He abused his position and she was angry about the unfairness of it.’

In his closing remarks to the court Crispin Aylett highlighted inconsistencies in the complainant’s evidence.

‘The first clear reference to any physical activity at all was 15 years after the event when she said the defendant had groped her.

‘She’s starting to look like an unreliable historian.

‘She is so determined to win this case that she will say anything to try and put her case in its best possible light.

‘She had the gall to say she was choosing her words with care.

‘Her memory is like a tuning television.

‘She said [to police] his left hand was behind her back and he touched her body with his right hand.

‘Her answer [in court] was he was next to me and it was sort of like an octopussy-like manoeuvre.

‘I asked her facetiously how many hands he had.

‘A scramble of hands is at odds with what she told [police].

‘She is not even consistent.

‘Unreliable historian is now a chronic understatement.

‘She has a natural tendency to embellish and exaggerate.

‘The so-called Weinstein narrative involves her being unable to tell anyone what happened to her for fear of losing her job but she did tell Human Resources.

‘She could have gone to police in 1999 after she told Human Resources… once Human Resources hadn’t done anything about it.

‘Instead she waited and waited until events on the other side of the world led her to believe she might become a standard bearer for other complainant’s about Crispin Odey.

‘Nobody suggests she is doing this for the money. She has explained her hashtag motivation.

‘I don’t suggest her distress is anything other than genuine but it is borne of anger and anger is not evidence.

‘Her imagination plays tricks on her.

‘Someone who manipulates the truth to get what she wants.

‘She has got what she wants.

‘She said getting the crown prosecution service to prosecute this matter was a victory in itself.

‘You simply cannot be sure she is telling the complete truth.’

Odey was cleared of thrusting his hand up a young investment banker’s skirt after a judge said the woman’s evidence might have been inspired by the MeToo movement.

The 62-year-old was accused of indecently assaulting the 26-year-old woman at his Chelsea home in July 1998.

He vehemently denied the charge and was cleared today at Westminster Magistrates’ Court.

Odey had remained seated throughout the 30-minute judgement, which concluded with District Judge Nicholas Rimmer telling him: ‘The real issue for me to decide is who is telling the truth.

‘You are cleared.’

His wife Nichola Pease said ‘yes’ and cheered the verdict. Before the judge rose she ran into the dock and hugged her husband.

The pair shook hands with Odey’s lawyers as the multimillionaire wiped his brow with a handkerchief and said: ‘The relief, the relief is awful. Thank you. There was just too many inconsistencies. He got them all. It was so fair.’

The judge said: ‘At some point in 1998 she…met you during the course of a business meeting.

‘You extended to her an invitation to meet you again.

‘There was nothing wrong with a meeting between you in itself.

‘At the time she complains of, assuming around July 1998 you were 39 and she was 26 give or take. About 13 years younger than you.

‘She said you were older than my dad in her 2013 interview.

‘In 2017 she gave your approximate age as 60s at the time of her report.

‘I find she was plainly mistaken in her recollection of your respected ages.

‘Her allegation in interview was you returned in a garment, a lounge coat or dressing gown. When she first described it she said it was not a robe but later said it appeared to be a robe and you had reportedly showered. Her online quotes [from the report she filled out in 2018] said you were wearing only a robe.

‘You describe the allegation you had taken a shower or been robed as rubbish.

‘She said ‘he started groping me everywhere putting his hands’ – plural – ‘up my skirt and down my breasts’.

‘In the first police interview she did not mention either of your hands on her back.

‘Her account in her 2018 interview was that in the kitchen ‘he sat down he tried to get all on top of me all over me but I was a little bit stuck in the booth, there was this very awkward me trying to get out and him all over me. He launched over me he groped all over me he put his hands’ – plural – ‘all over my shirt and on my back. I wouldn’t put my life on it but he definitely had his hands down my shirt.

‘She said in court it was only one hand groping because the other was grabbing my back. Reminded by Mr Aylett of her account ‘that you tried to get all over me’ she said he was next to me, so it was a sort of octopussy-like manoeuvre.

‘I’m left in doubt about the room in which the alleged incident is said to have taken place.

‘In her police interview she remembered the ‘bare, sterile’ kitchen.

‘She did not mention a booth in the kitchen at all to the court.

‘She did not mention wrestling, she did not mention whether she screamed at you telling you to stop, but she did tell [police] she did scream.

‘I am left unsure of what was said between you.

‘She accounted for the discrepancy on her online form by saying she filled out the form late at night when I was very distressed.

‘Such discrepancies do not assist the court as to the reliability of her memory or the description of the alleged assault.

‘Those discrepancies may seem trifling and reasonable given the passage of time.

‘Each one combines to weave an inconsistent thread of doubt.

‘I accept the evidence of you Mr Odey as credible, because you have remained consistent throughout.

‘I cannot accept her evidence as credible. She admitted telling a lie in an email to you that she had instructed solicitors.

‘She said I’m not going to deny it because it’s sitting right there.

‘It is a lie that strikes a blow against her overall credibility.

‘She accepts her evidence against Julian Barrell was mistaken. She gave evidence her colleague Chris Whitehosue was present on 6 November 1999 and even described his oral reaction in interview by mimicking a noise he supposedly made in shock.

‘In this trial she accepted she was wrong about the presence of that witness and acknowledged it had been established that he wasn’t there.

‘If she was wrong about the presence of that witness I must ask myself might she be wrong about her complaint about you.

‘Might it be down to her vivid imagination? Inspired by the allegations against Mr Weinstein and the MeToo movement. I cannot discount that it might.

‘She laughed about your status as a billionaire.

‘She seemed to poke fun at your funds more recent investments… this is the universe’s karma, he has lost all his money.

‘She said his mannerisms are all weird, red face, thinning hair, is unattractive, kind of fat.

‘The photographs of you in 1995 and 1997 do not bear out her recollection of you.

‘Her preoccupation for press, for money.

‘I am left unsure of her account.’

The judge said testimony from two of her colleagues ‘was as consistent with your account as with hers’ and evidence from one other colleague and her ex boyfriend ‘was more consistent with your account’.

Odey, of Swan Walk, Chelsea, denied of indecent assault after a three day trial heard at Hendon and then Westminster Magistrates’ Court.
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