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Accused British Teacher Was Too Short To Commit Sex Act With Teen Student As Described, Lawyer Says
A former student of Kandice Barber testified in court that the pair performed sexual acts together on three separate occasions, including once in a field.
The attorney for a married British teacher accused of having sex with her teenage student argued in court this week that her client was too short to have carried out the sex act as the alleged victim described.
Kandice Barber, 35, is facing three charges of sexual activity with a child after prosecutors contend that she had sex with the 15-year-old student, according to the BBC.
Barber, a married mother of three from Buckinghamshire, was convicted in 2020 of sending topless pictures of herself to the teen, who has not been publicly identified. She is now on trial for additional charges connected to the prosecutor’s allegations that the relationship became sexual in October 2018. Jurors in the first trial failed to reach a consensus on the charges of sexual activity with a child, which prompted the second trial at Amersham Law Courts.
Prosecutor Richard Milne told jurors that Barber first approached the teen at a sports event in September 2018, took his phone and added her details into his Snapchat account. The pair allegedly began to message each other through the social media app. Prosecutors said the conversations quickly turned sexual.
In October 2018, Barber picked the teen up in her car and drove to a “private” field where they had sex, prosecutors said. The teen testified in court that the pair had met for sexual activity on three different occasions, The Daily Mail reports.
However, Barber’s attorney, Nadia Chbat, questioned the teen’s description of the encounters, suggesting that some of the sexual acts could not have happened the way the teen had described, as Barber is 5 feet tall.
The alleged victim, who is now 18, told the jury that in one encounter he had stood behind his teacher as she guided him.
“You accept she is quite tiny, only about 5 feet, isn’t she — so you were taller than her at the time, weren’t you?” Chbat asked, according to the tabloid. “You did not even think she could reach your shoulders at the time, would she?’”
During cross-examination by Milne, the teen said he had “crouched” and bent his knees to overcome the height difference between the pair.
When questioned about the alleged relationship with his teacher by another teacher, prosecutors said the teen initially denied the relationship because he was “worried and scared” that Barber was pregnant with his child.
“She said he should deny everything and should delete all the messages,” Milne said, adding that the teen said that Barber later called him crying and telling him she’d had a miscarriage.
Milne told the court that Barber had also threatened the teen that she would “bring him down with her” if he ever made any public allegations against her. The teen also testified that during the alleged pregnancy scare, interactions with his teacher became “awkward.”
“I began to panic and didn’t know what to do in that situation,” he said, according to the BBC. “I didn’t know what was going on.”
Chbat said Barber has denied that any sexual activity between the pair even took place. The trial continues this week.
