A WOMAN has told jurors she was raped in a toilet at Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital.

The university student, who was 21 at the time, said she was attacked in the West Wing of the Headington hospital on October 30 last year.

Ian Joseph, 44, who denies a charge of rape, went on trial at Oxford Crown Court yesterday.

Jurors heard that the woman was waiting for her sister in the foyer at about 8.35pm when she went to a cubicle near reception.

She said she had noticed Joseph, of no fixed address, hanging around the area and assumed he was working there.

In a video interview played to jurors, she told of the moment she entered the toilet and realised Joseph was behind her.

She said: “The man I had seen at the counter was stood at the door. I said ‘sorry’, because I thought he wanted to use that cubicle, then he told me to get inside and I said ‘no’.

“Then he kept persisting and before I knew it he was in and the doors were locked and he was stood in the cubicle with me with his back to the door, so I was trapped in there.

“He said he needed to check something so my immediate thought was maybe he thought I was acting suspiciously, because nobody else was there (in the foyer).

“So I said ‘I promise I don’t have anything’ and he said ‘I need to check, I need to check’ and he was quite forceful with what he was saying.

“He told me to turn around and he told me to lift up my top so he could see my back, so I did and I kept saying ‘I promise I don’t have anything on me’.

“Then he told me to take my trousers off, I just said ‘no’ then he kept saying, he repeated himself at me, to take off my trousers and I said ‘I really have to go because my sister would be worried for me’ and then he said, through gritted teeth, I was making him mad and was going to get really mad in a minute, and that really frightened me , ecause I thought he might have a weapon on him.

“Through sheer fear I did what he said and he told me to turn around and then backed me to the wall.”

The complainant then described how the man performed a sex act on her before he left the toilet.

Neil Moore, prosecuting, said the woman raised the alarm immediately and Joseph was arrested in Southampton on November 1, after a hospital security guard had recognised him on CCTV.

Mr Moore said the defendant told police he walked into the woman’s cubicle but apologised and left immediately after realising it was being used.

The trial continues.