WEEPING RAPIST GETS TEN YEARS
A rapist who threatened to kill his victim if she went to the police wept as he was jailed for ten years.Trainee parking attendant Michael Phillips was convicted of two charges of rape and one of indecent assault on an 18-year-old German student.
He attacked her after following her from a late-night bus.
Phillips, 25, of Plymouth Avenue, Bevendean, Brighton, was arrested two days after the attack when police traced numbers from a mobile phone found at the scene.
The student was taking a short cut through parkland to her host family's Bevendean home when she was attacked last July.
She was raped twice and forced to commit a sex act in the 20-minute ordeal.
Phillips threatened to kill her if she told the police.
Sentencing Phillips to ten years at Lewes Crown Court yesterday, Judge Richard Brown said: "She was a young foreign student.
She was in this country for a very short time.
I have no doubt you knew that and you thought that would help avoid detection.
You put a series of pathetic lies before this jury in an attempt to escape responsibility." Phillips denied taking any part in the attack, but DNA proved it was a one-in-a-billion chance he was not the attacker.
Michael Harrison, defending, said Phillips had suffered troubled personal relationships as a young man.
He said: "He is effectively in denial and can't bring himself to accept what he did." John Price, prosecuting, said the attack still affected his victim.
He said: "It has caused feelings of great personal insecurity.
There was, of course, the anxiety of medical checks which follow all cases like this and which are still not complete." Her host family has also suffered.
He said: "While the victim was with them they regarded themselves as her substitute parents.
They were enormously distressed by what happened while she was their responsibility." Phillips was sentenced to ten years each for the two rapes and three years for the indecent assault to run concurrently.
He was also cleared of a further charge of robbery.
