‘The pictures of my penis I sent to girl were a joke’ says accused rapist

A shopkeeper accused of raping a 15-year-old girl has told a court the indecent pictures he sent her were just ‘a joke.’

Daniel Bryant, 30, admits being in a sexual relationship with the child when he allegedly raped her in Surrey in August 2015.

Bryant, who is now on benefits, was 28 at the time and claims he thought the girl was 16 at the time because she had ‘constantly’ come into his shop wearing normal clothes during school hours.

He said she added him on Facebook after meeting him at the One Stop shop in Holland Road, Hurst Green, Oxted, in 2015.

Bryant told the Old Bailey they started a sexual relationship after she asked him out on WhatsApp, and that the teen ‘was the first person to actually like me for who I am’.

Prosecutor Nicola Merrick told the court Bryant had sent pictures of his genetalia via WhatsApp to the victim.

‘Now that’s an indication of you being quite desperate,’ Ms Merrick said.

Bryant said: ‘That was a joke. That’s an old picture I’ve had on my phone before.’

The alleged rapist told the court some of his more perverse sexual advances were made ‘in a jokey way’, and added: ‘If she says no, that means no’.

He had previously told the court he thought his victim was a year older because there were no pictures of her wearing a school uniform on Facebook.

Police found an indecent video nearly two minutes long of an underage girl on Bryant’s Blackberry when he was arrested in October 2015, jurors heard.

The alleged child abuser claims the video was sent to him after he joined the social media group ‘Facebook BBM Pins’, and he told the court he tried to delete the video, but failed.

Ms Merrick said: ‘It’s just untrue that you were busy trying to delete that video.

‘What it does, it demonstrates that you had an interest in young girls.’

Bryant said: ‘No, I have an 11-year-old son, I don’t have an interest in any young girls.’

A jury question was put to Bryant about why he didn’t buy a new memory card and destroy the old one.

He said: ‘I am on benefits, I don’t have a lot of money to travel to buy a new memory card.

‘That’s destroying evidence. If I got rid of that memory card that would’ve looked bad because it would have been destroying something reliable.’

Bryant denies one count of rape, eight counts of sexual activity with a child and one count of possessing an indecent image of a child between 18 June and 5 October 2015.

When he was interviewed by police in October 2015, he said: ‘She comes into my shop dressed in normal clothes, so I think she’s 16 because she comes in jeans and a t shirt.

‘She comes in when all the kids are at school so I’m thinking that she’s left school.

‘She wanted to go out with me and one thing led to another and then she like basically she stopped talking to me because she found this other bloke that she was going out with.

‘He was, I think 18 or 19 and he was driving.

‘In the end he split up with her and she decided to come back towards me so I was basically the back up like if anything went wrong sort of thing and that’s basically what happened.

‘She started falling in love with me and I thought she was at the age of 16 where, you know, everything is fine, but I didn’t no she was 15, I had no idea.’

Bryant told the police his boss told him to ban the girl from his shop so he could get on with work.

‘She’s got nothing on her Facebook that shows her age, it says on there she’s 72 which doesn’t mean anything,’ he added.

‘And all of her pictures, most of her pictures on her Facebook are of her in normal clothes, nothing, no other version of school clothes or anything like that.’

Bryant said the teenager added him on Facebook and started messaging him after finding out his name, but Bryant claims he ‘defriended’ her because ‘she started, like, getting annoying’.

‘I just thought no I can’t be bothered, like I just got rid of her, deleted her off my Facebook and then she added me back again,’ he said.

Bryant told officers the girl then started to come to his house to watch television after they chatted on WhatsApp.

He said they would have sex ‘when she came round and wanted it’.

On one occasion, Bryant said: ‘She was stoned out of her face, she was on marijuana she was smoking and she was smoking cigarettes and she has come around and started grabbing me from behind and holding me.

‘She started bribing me with cigarettes, if I will give her sex then she will get two cigarettes off me, sort of like in exchange.’

Bryant insists he isn’t attracted to young girls but liked the complainant ‘because she was sweet, she was like, you know, she was like, she understood me’.

Bryant, of The Greenaway, Oxted, Surrey, denies one count of rape, eight counts of sexual activity with a child and one count of possessing an indecent image of a child between 18 June and 5 October 2015.

The trial continues

Ends