A former chair of the Criminal Bar Association (CBA) made a woman who was an aspiring lawyer have sex with him against her wishes, a disciplinary tribunal has heard.
Navjot “Jo” Sidhu, who was once a contender to be the director of public prosecutions, is charged with 10 breaches of the Bar Standards Board (BSB) rules for alleged predatory behaviour towards two women.
Sidhu, who chaired the CBA when it launched its 2022 strike over pay and was a king’s counsel until relinquishing his practising certificate as a barrister earlier this year, denies all the charges.
In closing submissions at the bar tribunal and adjudications service in London on Friday, Fiona Horlick KC, representing the BSB, said Sidhu invited a paralegal, who was in her 20s and was work-shadowing him, to his hotel room to work on a case in November 2018.
Against her wishes, he then insisted she stay in the room overnight, sleep in his bed – despite her saying she would use the sofa – and initiated sexual contact with her.
“She felt trapped in that situation and what she was made to do was against her wishes. She said: ‘I always knew it was wrong,’” said Horlick.
The lawyer continued: “To have induced reluctant consent and something out of the blue on the first night of her mini pupillage is a clear breach [of the professional code].”
Sidhu then “gaslit” the woman, telling her the next day: “You weren’t very responsive last night,” the tribunal heard. Horlick said the woman had been honest in her evidence in saying that she touched Sidhu’s genitals during sex, but Horlick described it as “unwanted sex” and warned Sidhu’s legal team against perpetuating “rape myths”.
She told the tribunal that later contact between the pair did not mean “everything she said about the first night must be wrong … he procured the normalisation of the relationship”.
Nine days after that incident, Sidhu invited a university law student who had initiated contact on LinkedIn to a hotel room and touched her knee, the tribunal heard.
Horlick described the student, who had anorexia, as a “particularly vulnerable person”, of which she said Sidhu was aware, who “came to understand his conduct was predatory. She questioned whether she was being exploited, potentially groomed.”
Alisdair Williamson KC, representing Sidhu, said his client did not give evidence in his own defence because of medical reasons. He told the tribunal: “Navjot Sidhu is not a monster, he is not a predator.”
He said it was not enough that his client was a KC for him to have abused his position. “Abuse connotes some active manipulation of that position and we suggest that he hasn’t done that,” said Williamson.
He told the tribunal that the paralegal had “recast in her mind” what had happened in the hotel room and they subsequently had a “warm and flirtatious relationship”, which meant one could “infer from her later behaviour that it [what happened in the hotel] was not unwanted”.
Williamson said the university student had a personal relationship with Sidhu in which she was “enthusiastically participating” and they had “the barest of professional contact”, which involved him helping her with her CV and watching him in court. Sidhu touching her on the knee could be regarded as “normal social interaction”, he added.
He told the tribunal: “These two examples do not offset, we suggest, the many hundreds of people who came into contact with him who did not experience anything other than beneficial interactions with him.”
There were originally 15 charges but five – including one against a third woman – were struck out on Thursday. The tribunal is expected to give its judgment next month.
