A FORMER model, who claims to have been raped by Owen Oyston on a four-poster bed at his home when she was a teenager, yesterday (Wednesday) admitted accepting money totalling £1,300 from him in the months immediately after the alleged assault.

The 25-year-old blonde agreed that she had taken sums of £700, £400 and £200 from him on three separate occasions.

Now married, she was facing her fifth day of questioning in the witness box at Liverpool Crown Court, where Oyston, chairman of Blackpool Football Club, denies raping her and raping and indecently assaulting another model.

She said she had never asked the tycoon for money, but had no qualms about accepting it because she said she was owed a large amount of money by a model agency with whom, she believed, Oyston was connected.

"Model Team owed me such a hell of a lot of money. I was probably accepting funds from him because I knew he was part of the agency."

She agreed with defence counsel Anthony Scrivener that £700 was a large sum for a girl of her age to receive.

Then, her voice breaking with emotion, she looked towards the jury and said: "I know exactly what you are all thinking when you look at me and think: Why did she accept all that money?

"I was owed money. When I look back now at the age I was then, I was young and brainwashed and torn apart by big people.

"When you look back at when you were younger it all looks different now."

She denied that she had asked him for £2,000 to buy a car. "Did I heck. I wouldn't ask for that sort of money when I had been raped by him."

She also denied asking him for money to fund a shop or to pay for a driving test.

Later she denied sharing a suite with Oyston "on many occasions" and inviting him to her birthday party at the Hilton. "It was obvious to many people that you were his girlfriend," suggested Mr Scrivener. "I was not," she replied.

The girl alleges she was driven to Oyston's home, Claughton Hall, near Lancaster, in the middle of the night where she was forced to have sex on the antique four-poster in his bedroom.

On Tuesday, judge, jury - eight women and four men - and lawyers headed north by coach to view Claughton Hall. But they hit traffic jams on the M6 and didn't arrive until early in the afternoon. Oyston has already been cleared of indecently assaulting the girl.

It was the second time the court had adjourned to the hall - former home of Sam Morse who invented the famous code. At an earlier trial at Manchester a jury had failed to agree a verdict on the alleged rape.

This time the jury spent an hour going round the hall - this time without the Press who gathered in the nearby Fenwick Arms.

Proceeding

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