A man has been cleared of raping a woman after she let him sleep overnight at the flat where she was staying with friends.

She invited him over because he told her he was having difficulty in getting home to Sittingbourne in the early hours.

They met after leaving a nightclub in Chatham in July 2013, when they chatted and he gave her his jacket to keep warm.

The woman, who had been out with friends, left the club when it closed at 3am.

“I had a fair bit to drink,” she told a jury at Maidstone Crown Court.

“I liked his eyes. He seemed quite old school and chivalrous. I didn’t get that creepy, sharky impression of him.

“I put my phone number in his phone. I said he could crash at mine if he liked.”

Her two friends went to sleep in a bedroom. She changed into her night clothes of shorts and a T-shirt. She removed her bra but kept her knickers on.

Describing herself as “giggly drunk”, she said she curled up on the sofa to go to sleep with her back to O’Reilly.

“I wasn’t worried he was going to rape me at that point, otherwise I wouldn’t have let him stay in the flat,” she said.

O’Reilly, now of Chillington Street, Maidstone, was being “touchy feely”, kissing her neck, she said, and she told him to get off. He allegedly put his hand inside her knickers.

“I was making it clear I didn’t want him to touch me,” she continued. “I had no desire to go near him in a sexual way.”

Asked by the defence lawyer, why she didn’t scream, Judge Martin Joy intervened: “There is no duty on a woman to scream or even struggle. The issue is whether she consented.”

The woman said O’Reilly, 30, took her shorts off. When he started to have intercourse with her, she said, she elbowed him and got up. She went into the bedroom and returned and told him to go.

“I was shaken up,” she added.

“I was really angry at the situation – angry that I was stupid enough to put myself in that
situation.”