Soldier sexually assaulted colleague after saying she’d ‘massage her to sleep’
A musician in one of the oldest bands in the British Army has been found guilty of sexually assaulting a colleague in a wine-fuelled attack.
Military clarinet player Adelle Foster tried to take her comrade’s clothing off after offering her to ‘massage her to sleep’.
Foster groped her and, as she protested, told the victim: ‘I’m still going to touch you.’
The victim, who had a boyfriend, said Foster recorded the incident, with the audio played at a hearing.
Foster was a member of the Coldstream Guard, easily recognisable for their red tunics and bearskin caps while guarding Buckingham Palace.
The musician insisted to the victim she had only been ‘joking’ during the incident, which occurred in the early hours after Foster had drunk a bottle of wine, a board at Bulford Military Court in Wiltshire heard.
Commodore James Farrant, opening the case, said that Foster offered to give the woman a message. She refused, ‘but Musician Foster started stroking her hand anyway’, he said.
‘[The woman] tried to lift this off.’ Foster grabbed the victim’s bottom and breasts, the commodore said, and tried to take the woman’s clothing off.
‘She eventually stopped following [the woman]’s polite protest,’ Commodore Farrant said, adding that Foster then touched the woman’s genitals through her jeans again.
After being told ‘no’ by the alleged victim, Foster mocked her by ‘repeating [her] protestations to her’.
‘Are you going to tell your boyfriend?’ Foster asked the woman, Commodore Farrant told the board.
Musician Foster sent a message to the woman telling her that she was ‘just trying to be friends’, and ‘not to make herself a victim’ at around 2.40am.
She tried to phone the woman and asked if she was ‘pretending to be a victim’.
The victim told Foster that she shouldn’t have touched her. Foster replied: ‘Before, when I was joking and touching you, I was joking.’
Foster told investigators she could not recall saying she was joking and denied touching her colleague inappropriately.
The victim told the court: ‘She admitted herself by saying, “I just tried to make the situation lighter”.’
Foster will be sentenced at a later date.
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