Female Met police staffer 'woke up with colleague's penis in her mouth' after he 'smoked cannabis he stole from a raid'
26 April 2023, 09:04 | Updated: 26 April 2023, 09:24
A former Met police staff member has told LBC she was sexually assaulted by a serving officer who’d gotten high on cannabis which he stole from a house raid.
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Sharon, whose name we’ve changed to protect her identity, says she was left shaken by the ordeal - but it was the response of other colleagues that led to her quitting her job.
Having worked in a specialist team in the force for 17 years, which often deals with rape and sex assault cases, Sharon said she was close to her colleagues, including her attacker.
But she said she was left "frozen" when he took advantage of her after a night out together.
"We’d been out to a gig and I was going to sleep over at his, which I’d done a few times before, and he’d decided to smoke some weed,” she said.
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"We were talking about it and he was making a joke about how he and his colleagues had found it when they were doing a drug search of a property.
"They basically judged that it was a small enough amount that they could get away with keeping it for themselves.
Sharon went on: “I had fallen asleep and I don’t know what time he’d come in because I was super tired and completely out of it, but I was woken up by him putting his penis in my mouth.
"I was completely confused and shocked and I don’t think I even had time to make a decision about pushing him away or anything and was basically frozen."
The claims are the latest in a string of damning stories to have emerged against a number of serving Met Police officers, with a review claiming the force’s handling of sexual and domestic abuse proves it is ‘institutionally misogynistic’.
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Sharon said she didn’t make a formal complaint after telling a handful of her colleagues what had happened; with one telling her it "turned him on".
She said: “You just pretty much want to forget about the whole thing but I was worrying about it happening to other people.
“I told a friend who was a police officer exactly what had happened and his response was something like ‘is it funny that this turns me on?’
"I remembered that he’d at one point also called most people he dealt with who reported sexual offences 'narcissistic bitches with a grudge’ and he was actually trained as a sexual offences officer.
"I suppose I didn’t really want to face making any formal complaint about it after that because I was seeing these sorts of offences on a weekly basis and knew already they were the worst kind of offences to prove. But what he said was the final nail in the coffin, to be honest."
A spokesperson for the Met Police said the allegations were "deeply concerning" and reached out to the woman to ask if she would be prepared to share further details with the force’s professional standards team, so they can investigate them further.
They added: "The recently published review by Baroness Casey highlighted significant concerns with the Met's internal standards and culture and we are committed to rebuilding trust and confidence with the public and the honest majority of our officers and staff.
"We have put more resources into proactively identifying and rooting out those who corrupt our integrity, as well as checking the details of all 50,000 people employed by the Met against intelligence records on the Police National Database."
Sharon, however, said it was the response to the arrest and conviction of the likes of Wayne Couzens and David Carrick that contributed to her wanting to leave the Met.
"There were a lot of women working in the Met who had that thought of ‘oh my gosh is it the same man who assaulted me?’,” she said, "and just the reaction in the way the Met dealt with everything - the defensiveness, lack of accountability, trying to carry on as normal.
"It was just the beginning of the end I think. I didn’t want to be associated with them any more. It wasn’t enough that I was still doing good work and had friends, I just couldn’t be around it because I didn't think it was a healthy place to be."
If you or anyone you know has been affected by any of the issues in this article, you can contact the Rape Crisis 24/7 Rape and Sexual Abuse support line for free on 0808 500 2222.
