Jurors in the trial of the footballer Adam Johnson have begun considering verdicts on two counts of sexual activity with a 15-year-old schoolgirl.
The England midfielder has denied that he and the teenager performed sex acts on each other in his Range Rover car on January 30th last year.
He admitting kissing and grooming the girl on the first day of his trial on February 10th.
On Tuesday a jury of eight women and four men began deliberating their verdicts on the further two counts at Bradford crown court.
The judge, Jonathan Rose, sent the jurors out to consider their verdicts at 11.52am.
Johnson, from Castle Eden in County Durham, sat in the glass-panelled dock at the rear of the court as the jury were sent out. His father, sister and ex-girlfriend Stacey Flounders sat together on the front row of the public gallery, out of his eyeshot.
Johnson had denied all four of the allegations until the first day of his trial, when he pleaded guilty to two counts of grooming and kissing the schoolgirl.
He continued to deny that he did anything further than kiss the teenager and disputed her allegation that they engaged in two further sex acts.
The victim, now 16, was a Sunderland season ticket holder who “idolised” Johnson and regularly waited outside the club’s Stadium of Light for a picture with her hero, the court has heard.
They began swapping messages on New Year’s Eve and 18 days later Johnson met the girl to give her a signed Sunderland shirt. The next time they met, on January 30th, they engaged in sex acts in his car behind a Chinese takeaway in Co Durham.
Giving evidence, the £60,000-a-week footballer told his trial that Sunderland AFC knew that he admitted kissing and sending explicit messages to the girl as long ago as May 2015.
The judge reminded jurors on Monday that Johnson had admitted lying on eight occasions. However, he said “lies alone cannot prove a case” and that the jury must not assume he is guilty because he lied.
He said: “The prosecution says these lies were told in an attempt to conceal Adam Johnson’s guilt.” But he said the defence case was that “such lies as he has told are merely the panicked response of a man who had done wrong by his family”.
(Guardian service)
