A dad who told detectives he was ‘anti-nonce’ was cleared of sexually assaulting a primary school-aged girl.

Jurors at Oxford Crown Court took little more than an hour to unanimously find Gordon Appleby not guilty of touching the girl.

The youngster – then aged seven or eight - claimed to have been sexually assaulted by 38-year-old Appleby, while hiding behind the sofa at his Oxford flat during a game of hide and seek.

The allegations came to light several years later after the girl, who was separately said to have been sexually abused by a convicted paedophile, told her mother in January 2020 then spoke to a teacher at her school.

Appleby strenuously denied the claim, telling police and then jurors that the sofas in his flat could not be moved away from the wall in any event and his young son, with whom the girl was said to have been playing, did not like the dark.

Jurors were told that, during his police interview in 2020, he informed the police he was ‘anti-nonce and anti-paedophile’.

“I don’t like what they do,” he said of child sex offenders.

Closing his client’s case to the jury on Wednesday morning, barrister Jonathan Coode said: “What the prosecution say about this man, this 38-year-old whose fate is in your hands and you may think that his fate is important, because if you make what I will try to persuade you is the wrong decision in this case and you convict him on the strength of the evidence you’ve heard, that’s life-changing.

“‘Paedo’, ‘nonce’, ‘kiddie-fiddler’. They’re not very nice words in [any] strata of society, but we all know what they mean.

“That’s what the Crown is accusing this man of [being].”

Those were words that applied to the other man against whom the child had made allegations, and who was ‘doing a very, very long stretch for, let’s put it in the vernacular, kiddie-fiddling’, Mr Coode said.

He urged the jury to ‘hang onto’ what fictional hero Rumpole of the Bailey called the ‘golden thread’ running through the evidence. He pointed to inconsistencies between the complainant’s various statements and accounts.

Mr Coode added that the girl’s account to her teacher, to whom she spoke in January 2020, about what Appleby did was ‘almost exactly what it is she said [the second man] did to her and she had been questioned by the police about’.

The court heard that, a few days before she spoke to her mother about the alleged abuse, she had gone missing from home after being shouted at by an absent father who had returned for Christmas.

Appleby, of Ashhurst Way, Oxford, was cleared of sexual assault of a child under-13.

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This story was written by Tom Seaward. He joined the team in 2021 as Oxfordshire's court and crime reporter.  

To get in touch with him email: Tom.Seaward@newsquest.co.uk

Follow him on Twitter: @t_seaward