A convicted rapist is back behind bars for another sex attack after offering to help a woman locked out of her home.

Predator Nathan Gifford was cleared of rape but convicted of assault by penetration.

The jury heard about similarities between the two offences in which he took advantage of intoxicated women.

In the first, he offered his victim a lift home after she staggered out of Bliss nightclub in Gillingham on Christmas Eve 2011 and then raped her before “unceremoniously” dumping her in the street.

He denied the offence but was convicted and jailed for eight years in August 2012. He had previously been convicted of sexual assault in 1995.

In the latest case the victim had been drinking in October last year when she saw 50-year-old Gifford near her Maidstone house and told him she had locked herself out.

He offered to help and they climbed over garages to get to her back garden, where she had left a spare key under a stone. But after trying it she realised it was for the front door.

A bedroom window was open on the first floor and he climbed onto a flat roof and entered – a decision she later described as “absolutely ridiculous”.

As Gifford helped the woman through a kitchen window he put his hand inside her trousers and sexually assaulted her.

Once inside, he was alleged to have pulled down her trousers, pushed her against the sink and raped her.

The victim ran upstairs to her bedroom, telling him to leave, before phoning the police.

The woman had been “troubled”, saying she was having “a horrendous time” at work, and made a series of phone calls to the police earlier that afternoon.

She had drunk about two bottles of white wine and was still affected by alcohol when the police arrived.

“She was reluctant to give a full account,” said prosecutor Peter Forbes. “She was distressed and said she deserved it.

“She thought she was wrong because she was vulnerable and drunk, and she should not allow herself to be like this.”

Officers saw a footprint on an ottoman storage box near her bedroom window. When they went back the next day she was intoxicated again and said she was not making any allegation because she had put herself in that position.

She declined a full medical examination, but a DNA sample from her trousers matched Gifford and he was arrested.

“She thought she was wrong because she was vulnerable and drunk, and she should not allow herself to be like this" - Peter Forbes

Jurors were told that the victim had made two previous rape allegations.

Denying both charges, Gifford, of Wrangleden Road, Maidstone, said when the woman climbed in the kitchen window he told her to put her arms around his neck.

“I reached down to the bottom of her bum cheek,” he said. “I took hold of her there. I felt bare flesh. It was a bit tight trying to get her in the window.

“I touched the top half of her leg. Her trousers were down on one side.”

He claimed he may have touched the woman intimately by accident. He denied having intercourse with her.

“I asked her if she wanted a drink of some sort – tea or water,” he said. “I thought it might help her out a little bit. She seemed OK. I would say nervous.

“She didn’t want a drink. She said: ‘Could you please go now.’”

Sentence was adjourned to August 10.