Andrew Wallace prosecuted Alexander Westwood, a young actor, who has appeared in several Netflix productions including ‘Sex Education’. He was a manipulative sexual predator who developed a fascination with pornography from a very young age and used it to inspire his offending.
After a trial lasting over 4 weeks, Westwood was convicted of all 26 Counts on the Indictment relating to the systematic abuse of 5 victims, 4 of whom were children. He further used his status as an actor to create the opportunities for abusing 2 of his victims.
From school age, he had committed serious sexual assaults against one girl and had also incited a boy to engage in sexual activity.
He committed several serious sexual assaults against an ex-girlfriend.
Then having achieved success as an actor, two 16-year-old girls who wanted to go to drama school independently came to him for acting lessons. He used these lessons as an opportunity to engage in his own sexual fantasies. On the pretext of their having to cope with embarrassment and romantic roles, and because he was the teacher with experience in the field, he deliberately chose roles involving the acting out of explicit sex scenes including an incest scene to persuade the girls to undress and allow him to touch them intimately and to sexually assault them. He filmed them.
In the case of one of these girls it led to several rapes. His desire to control and manipulate his victim knew no bounds. When that girl had obtained a place at drama school and wanted nothing more to do with him, he threatened to destroy her acting prospects by contacting the principal of the Drama School. That was an idle threat, as the last thing he really wanted to do was to discuss with the Principal her reasons for stopping her lessons. And when that did not work, in desperation, he created a sham contract which he forced her to sign, even though her mother had been the one until then paying for the lessons, and because she was a child the contract was meaningless and unenforceable in any event. Of course he never intended to try to enforce it. It was a device to keep her in line and to keep quiet, and to explain her “malicious” allegations if she told anyone of the rapes. So he then immediately began to threaten her that if she did not keep coming to his lessons that she would owe him £18,000 or more. At the trial he invented many lies, and suggested that she had made up the allegations to get out of this contract, and that the other victims had all been put up to it.
He will be sentenced in February.
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