Ten years for attention seeker who had innocent man jailed for rape

An attention-seeking liar whose fake rape claims sent an innocent man to prison has been jailed for ten years.

Jemma Beale, 25 claimed she was a lesbian with ‘no desire’ for sex with men and her ‘appalling lies’ led to Mahad Cassim serving two years in jail.

The fantasist told police Mr Cassim raped her after offering to give her a lift home – when in fact she pointed him to an alleyway and told him to drop his trousers.

Beale was later awarded £11,000 in criminal injuries compensation while Mr Cassim languished behind bars.

In a victim impact statement, he described the trauma of being imprisoned and how the conviction destroyed his relationships with friends and family due to the suspicion hanging over it.

‘One of my goals in life is to be a successful businessman, to have a nice family and be happy,’ he said.

‘I’m working on the happiness.

‘I have a long way to go.’

Jurors heard Beale invented claims that she had been seriously sexually assaulted by six men and raped by nine, all strangers, in four different encounters over the space of three years.

Most of those came as she sought attention following drunken rows with girlfriends.

Police spent a staggering 6,400 hours investigating her lies at a cost to the taxpayer of £250,000.

Her contested trial cost a further £109,000.

Lawrence Henderson defending told the court today: ‘Ms Beale stands by the complaints she made in this matter, and if she had her time again she would still plead not guilty to these matters and contest the trial.’

Beale complained to police she was groped by a complete stranger, Noam Shahzad, in The Windsor Castle pub, in Hounslow, in July 2012, before he took part in a vicious gang rape on her in the car park of a nearby medical centre.

CCTV later showed that Beale had attacked him in the pub before walking home alone.

Forensic tests also showed she had cut herself with a hanging flower basket to make it look like she had been sexually assaulted with barbed wire.

Mr Shahzad skipped bail and fled the country after being charged with sexual assault.

Beale then fabricated similar allegations against six other men in 2013.

She claimed two strangers sexually assaulted outside her home in Addlestone, Surrey, before she was put through another gang rape attack by four others two months later in Feltham.

Two of the men identified by Beale – Luke Williams, 28, and 25-year-old Steven McCormack – were arrested and interviewed but never charged.

Beale insisted she had been raped but was convicted following a five-week trial at Southwark Crown Court last month.

Judge Nicholas Loraine-Smith told her: ‘Following Mr Cassim’s conviction, you made an application for compensation which was successful.

‘You also prepared a harrowing victim impact statement for the sentencing judge in which you claimed that Mr Cassim had ruined your life.

‘This trial has revealed, what was then not obvious, that you are a very, very convincing liar and that you enjoy being seen as a victim.

‘The prosecution described your life as a ‘construct of bogus victimhood’.

‘I can only see that victim impact statement as an attempt to persuade the judge to sentence a man you knew to be innocent to an even longer term of undeserved imprisonment.

‘Mr Cassim was sentenced to seven years imprisonment of which he served over two years and nine months.

‘You were solely responsible for that miscarriage of justice.

‘I have now read Mr Cassim’s very dignified and measured victim impact statement about the effect that your false allegations and perjury had on him.

‘Some of his family stood by him, some did not.

‘He optimistically thinks it will take him four or five years to get what you did to him out of his system.

‘He is trying to forgive you but is understandably finding it very hard.’

The judge said all her subsequent lies ‘have to be seen against the background that you had already sent one man to prison for a very long time for something that he had not done’.

‘These offences usually began as a drunken attempt to get your partner’s sympathy or perhaps to arouse her jealousy,’ he continued.

‘They each began impulsively but what is particularly chilling is the manner in which you persisted in making allegations which you knew were untrue even to the extent of committing and repeating perjury.’

Beale made her first complaint on the morning of 26 November 2010, when she told police she had been raped by Mr Cassim the previous night.

Jurors heard the 37-year-old Somalian moved to the UK in 2002, aged 23, after a short stint living in Sweden where he also served in the military as part of the peace-keeping corps.

Beale said she asked for and accepted a lift home from Mr Cassim before he stopped the car and attacked her when she went to urinate.

But Mr Cassim insisted Beale led him on, directing him to a discreet alleyway where the pair had consensual sex.

‘We drove for about ten minutes and while we were in the car we were talking and then she came and gave me a rub on my knuckles, my hand,’ he said.

‘She was asking me kind of questions, whilst rubbing my knuckles, asking, obviously about sex.’

He added: ‘I said ‘Are you sure?’ and she said yes – I asked three times ‘Are you sure?’ – and said OK.

Mr Cassim said they got out of the car and ‘all of a sudden, after about three yards she told me to pull off my underwear’.

He was tried for rape at Isleworth Crown Court in December 2011 but jurors were unable to reach verdicts.

A retrial in January 2012 in front of a fresh jury then saw him jailed for seven years.

In a victim impact statement following that verdict Beale described the ‘devastating’ effect the ‘rape’ had on her.

‘I feel that any sentence he receives will never reflect the life sentence that he gave me,’ she said.

Mr Cassim served two years because of the ‘grave injustice’ before he was released, prosecutor John Price, QC, said during Beale’s trial for perjury and perverting the course of justice.

Beale went on to tell police she was the victim of two sexual assaults in July 2012, one of which involved ‘sexual violence of a most serious kind’.

She claimed Mr Shahzad groped her at The Windsor Castle pub, in Hounslow, before the same man took part in a sickening gang attack in the car-park of a nearby medical centre using barbed wire.

Crime scene examiners recovered a number of items from a small gap between the side of the centre and a brick wall perimeter.

Among those was a hanging wire basket containing a small amount of Beale’s DNA along with one of her earrings.

Beale claimed the sample was left as she urinated there but prosecutors claimed the basket was used to cause the ‘self-inflicted’ injuries.

‘The group of men did not exist,’ said Mr Price.

Beale reported another serious sexual assault, this time by two men, on September 2, 2013 which she claimed it had happened five days earlier outside of her home.

Although neither alleged attacker was ever identified she said one of the pair was also involved the previous attack in July.

Again, jurors were told the entire incident was ‘a grotesque invention’.

Beale reported another gang attack ‘of the most appalling kind’ in Feltham, west London, two months later, on 17 November.

She claimed she had been raped one after the other by four of a group of eight men, and later picked out Luke Williams and Steven McCormack as being part of the group.

Both were arrested by police later that same day but never charged.

Beale had spent the evening with Mr Williams and others at a house party before willingly leaving with him to go and get alcohol and cigarettes.

She claimed Mr Williams, by this time armed with a machete, took her to a garage where he arranged for Mr McCormack and others to attack her.

In the days before the alleged assault, Mr McCormack said Beale had threatened to get him into trouble with the police.

‘Each of those reports made by Jemma Beale to the police is alleged by the prosecution in this case as being entirely false,’ said Mr Price.

‘She had not been raped.

‘Nor had she been sexually assaulted on any of these occasions.’

Beale was arrested in June 2014 and interviewed five times between then and April 2015 before she was eventually charged in March of last year.

Detective Sergeant Kevin Lynott said after her conviction: ‘Beale has been exposed as a serial liar.

‘I can only think that she was motivated partly by financial reward, but mainly the attention and control over her partners and family.’

Beale insisted she was a lesbian and said she had been in several relationships with women.

‘I’m not going to go to a man I don’t know and ask him for sex,’ she insisted from the witness box at Mr Cassim’s trial.

‘I ain’t bisexual at all.’

Beale, of (42) West View, Bedfont, Middlesex, was jailed for a total of 10 years.

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