A man who held a woman against her will has been cleared of raping her during a night of terror at her home in Oxfordshire.

James Payne, 32, had accepted throttling the victim around a week before and behaved aggressively towards her on the night of the alleged rape in March – but said that the sex between them later that evening had been consensual.

On Monday (September 18), a jury at Oxford Crown Court cleared the Swindon man of rape, but found him guilty of a charge of false imprisonment.

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They were unable to reach a verdict on an allegation of making threats to kill.

The Recorder of Oxford, Judge Ian Pringle KC, adjourned sentencing until October 27 and ordered probation reports to consider whether Payne represented a danger to the public.

The Wiltshire man will also be sentenced on that date for throttling a different woman, with that offence committed in Swindon in November 2022.

Last week, Payne’s brief Lyall Thompson asked the jury to consider that his client ‘reasonably believed’ the complainant was consenting to sex.

He accepted that this was a ‘shameful case of domestic abuse’ and that, as a country, we ‘do not like men who abuse women’.

But the barrister suggested that the sex between Payne and the complainant, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, had ‘every appearance of being consensual’.

Mr Thompson added: “You cannot make the leap from he has assaulted and abused her to he has raped her.”

For the prosecution, Charles Ward-Jackson asked the jury to conclude that the complainant had sex with the defendant ‘to stay alive’.

He compared the defendant’s actions to that of an eighteenth-century highwayman, demanding of his victims: “Your money or your life.”

“I suppose in a strict philosophical sense the highwayman would say I was giving my victim a choice,” the prosecutor said.

“Ladies and gentlemen, it’s not really a choice at all.”

Mr Ward-Jackson added: “It wasn’t your money or your life but sex or your life, as far as she was concerned.”

Payne, of Piernik Close, Swindon, was remanded into custody.

He will return to court for sentencing next month.