A man denies raping a woman he met during a night of karaoke singing and drinking at a West Oxfordshire pub.

Joseph Faulkner, 39, is accused of sexually assaulting the woman – who cannot be identified for legal reasons – after drinking with her and a number of her friends at The Woodman pub in North Leigh in 2019.

Opening the case to jurors at Oxford Crown Court on Tuesday (May 9), prosecutor Matthew Walsh told the jury that the defendant had followed the alleged victim back to where she was staying.

Summarising the prosecution case, he said: “[She] made it clear to Joseph Faulkner that she was not interested in him, that she did not want anything to happen and, specifically, she was not consenting to anything he was doing.

“Equally there was nothing, the prosecution say, that she was doing which could possibly have given him reasonable belief that she wanted anything sexual to happen.”

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He said the woman told the defendant she was ‘happy’ with her boyfriend. In an effort to dissuade him from his advances she even feigned sleep, it was alleged.

“She pretended to be asleep, her logic being that if she appeared asleep he would stop,” Mr Walsh said.

“She was wrong. He didn’t stop.

"She went further and she pretended to snore. Again, you may think that would have the effect of the person stopping, realising the person was asleep and therefore not continuing. But not in this case. Mr Faulkner carried on.”

The woman ‘eventually told him to stop and pushed him off’. “She recalls him saying something like ‘do you want me to stop?’ and her saying it was very painful,” the prosecutor said.

He remained at the property the following morning, it was said, when he was reportedly ‘trying to cuddle her, talking about spending the day with her’.

She was said to have initially been reluctant to report the matter to the police and it was, in fact, her mother who called the police.

Faulkner, of Park Close, North Leigh, denies allegations of rape and sexual assault. The trial continues.