A Fife man is facing a lengthy prison sentence after being convicted of the historic rape of a teenage girl and the sexual assault of a young woman.
First offender Ben McLeary had his name added to the sex offender’s register with immediate effect following his conviction on two charges at the High Court in Livingston on Wednesday.
He was found guilty of repeatedly raping and sexually assaulting the younger teenager, now aged 21, at his mother’s home in Glenrothes, on various occasions between February and June 2015.
He was also found guilty of sexually assaulting a former female friend, also now 21, at student flats in Dundee in March 2018.
McLeary, of Havannah Street, Glasgow, was acquitted of having under-age sex with a 15-year-old girl in April or May 2015 after the jury found the charge not proven.
McLeary, 21, used a tissue to dab away his tears in the dock as the jury’s majority verdicts were read out.
Earlier charges alleging that he took or attempted to take pornographic videos and photographs beneath the clothing of three young women were withdrawn by the prosecution due to lack of evidence.
‘I just continued to say no’
The first of McLeary’s victims told the jury that he pinned her to his bed and raped her when she was aged between 15 and 16.
She said she did not report him to the police at the time because it was her first sexual relationship and she “didn’t know what was normal and what wasn’t”.
She told the jury: “I would say no. I’d try to nudge him away from me. I’d be lying back on his bed and he’d be probably on top of me.
“He would work his way up and sort of pin my arms down to the bed either by my side or up to my shoulder with his knees.
“I just continued to say no, that I didn’t want to. He would say things like ‘you’ll like it’, ‘you usually enjoy it’, ‘it’s fun’ then he would just continue.
“I couldn’t do much physically with my hands pinned beside me.”
Denied assaulting his second victim
His second victim, now aged 21 and a former close friend of the accused, told how they had gone to Dundee for a university reunion with another friend in March 2018.
They both spent the night in a student residence there and in the middle of the night the victim invited McLeary to lie with her in the duvet on which she was sleeping on the floor.
She said he began to touch her sexually. She told the jury he did not ask if he could touch her and she did not say he could. She said they were close friends, nothing more.
She told how she lay “frozen” as he assaulted her and how she felt “embarrassed and disgusted” by what he did to her. Her student friend told how she was crying and distressed as she recounted what McLeary had done to her later that morning.
On the bus back to Glenrothes she said the she felt angry with McLeary when he denied sexually assaulting her.
The jury took just over seven hours to return their verdicts.