A Bridge of Allan man was jailed last week after being found guilty of raping three women in university halls or student flats linked to two Scottish universities – including in Stirling.
Lewis Grant, targeted victims from southern Scotland to Stirling, over a nine year period. His offending started in 2011 when he had unlawful sex with a 15-year-old in Dumfries.
Grant, now 28, went on to commit his first rape, of a student, in her halls at Queen Margaret University, Musselburgh, before raping two more women while he was a student at the University of Stirling.
One of the rapes involved BDSM [bondage, domination, sadism and masochism] and two of the rape victims were throttled by Grant to the danger of their lives.
One of them, a student in Stirling, described being lifted off the floor by Grant, a martial arts enthusiast, who had his hands round her neck as her legs dangled and she choked.
Another of his victims was beaten with a riding crop, waterboarded with Prosecco, burned with a blow torch, and choked until she thought she was going to die.
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She contacted police with photos of her injuries. Police investigated to see if Grant had any former partners who might also have been raped or abused and Grant was arrested a month later.
Giving evidence from behind a curtain at the High Court in Stirling the victim said she had she agreed to take part in “rougher sex” with Grant and went to his room in Stirling University accommodation in Bridge of Allan.
Grant began to hit her on the head with an open hand, then his fist, before pushing her off the bed onto the floor, pinning her hands above her head, covering her entire face with a cloth, and pouring sparkling wine very slowly and steadily over her mouth and face – while raping her at the same time.
She said: “I was suffocating. The cloth was heavy on my face.
“I was in such a panic I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to say stop.
“He continued to pour the Prosecco until the bottle was finished.”
She said Grant then took the cloth off and thrust his fist under her jaw. She then scrambled to the bathroom where she found a tooth had chipped.
She claimed on another occasion, in Grant’s Stirling University bedroom, he had lit a kitchen blowtorch, telling her, “This might be fun to use when you’re not behaving yourself.”
Grant put out the flame, but burned the bare skin of her back with the hot metal of the blowtorch, leaving a 20 pence-sized scar.
She said she decided to break up with Grant after he opened the door of her bathroom – where she had locked herself in – with a large kitchen knife.
At the end of a five week trial, a jury of 14 deliberated for two days before finding Grant, of Henderson Street, Bridge of Allan, guilty of raping the three women, and assaulting two of them to the danger of their lives.
He was acquitted of raping two other women – the jury returning verdicts of not guilty and not proven.
Grant was also found guilty of having sex with the underage child in Dumfries.
Grant, who funded his studies at Stirling by working in a Bridge of Allan restaurant, had denied the offences, claiming all the sex and BDSM was consensual. He said the assault of one of the women whose life he endangered did not take place in the way she described, and had been self defence.
He insisted he could not have performed some of the acts, because a massive hernia had deviated his penis.
All of his victims were, or had been, in relationships with him.
Judge Lord Summers deferred sentence until October 26 at the High Court in Edinburgh.
He remanded Grant in custody.
He said continuing his liberty would not be appropriate because he had been convicted “of a number of serious sexual offences and assaults”.
Grant was also placed on the sex offenders’ register.
Defence counsel Bert Kerrigan KC reserved mitigation.
