Woman who made false rape claims sentenced to 10 years in jail

A woman from Bedfont, west London, who made a series of false rape claims and sexual assault allegations has been sentenced to 10 years in jail, according to the Independent.

Jemma Beale, 25, claimed she had been sexually assaulted by six men and raped by nine – all of them strangers – in four different encounters in the span of three years. She was found guilty in July at Southwark Crown Court of four counts of perjury and four counts of perverting the course of justice.

After sentencing her, Judge Nicholas Loraine-Smith said: “This trial has revealed, what was then not obvious, that you are a very, very convincing liar and you enjoy being seen as a victim. The prosecution described your life as a ‘construct of bogus victim hood’.” The court police spent 6,400 hours investigating Beale’s claims at a cost of at least £250,000, and the trial cost at least £109,000, according to Prosecutor Medeleine Moore.

Lawrence Henderson, defending, noted that the woman still maintains her innocence, and she was considering appealing against sentence. “Ms Beale stands by the claims she made in this matter and if she had her time again she would again plead not guilty to these matters and contest the trial,” he told the court.

“These offences usually began as a drunken attempt to get your partner’s sympathy or perhaps to arouse her jealousy,” the judge said. “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. These false allegations of rape, false allegations which will inevitably be widely publicised, are likely to have the perverse impact of increasing the likelihood of guilty men going free. Cases such as this bring a real risk that a woman who has been raped or sexually assaulted may not complain to the police for fear of not being believed.”

An investigation into Beale was launched in December 2013, as one of the woman’s former girlfriends said that a man had been wrongly jailed after Beale lied about being raped by him in 2010. The information came to light during in 2014, during another investigation regarding a separate allegation by Beale, where she claimed to have been raped by a number of men. Starting to get suspicious, the police found common discrepancies and similar circumstances within the allegations, leading them to believe that Beale might have fabricated them.

Mahad Cassim was jailed for seven years after Beale made rape allegations regarding him. He said that he had been hugely affected by the false claim. “One of my goals is to be a successful businessman, to have a nice family and be happy,” he noted in a victim impact statement. “I am working on the happiness – I have a long way to go.”

Beale had claimed that she was groped by a stranger, Noam Shahzad, in a pub in July 2012 and that she was gang-raped by him and a group of other men. She said she had been assaulted with barbed wire and even injured herself to back up her claims. The woman made similar allegations against six other men in 2013, saying two strangers sexually assaulted her when she was close to home, before she was put through another gang rape attack by four others two months later.