A “DERANGED” WOMAN has been sentenced to six years in jail in the UK for using internet chat rooms to try to arrange for the rape of a former colleague.
Kent Online reports that Joanne Berry pretended to be her intended victim online and told men that she wanted them to help her act out a rape fantasy.
Maidstone Crown Court heard that the 30-year-old visited various sites saying that she wanted to “create some sort of rape scenario”.
The victim of Berry’s plans was a former work colleague to whom Berry had also sent a barrage of text messages for which she was warned by police.
Berry eventually convinced one man to go to the woman’s house and rape her. She gave the man the woman’s home address and told him to knock at the door and burst in.
When the man burst through the door he saw what he described as the woman’s “panic stricken” face and he did not go through with the plan. He waited for the police to arrive, provided them with a statement and also gave evidence at the trial.
He told the court that he felt he had been “groomed” by Berry.
He later wrote a letter of apology to the woman saying that he had been “set up by a very deranged person”.
BBC News reports that the trial judge said that it was “fortuitous” that her former workmate was neither raped nor sexually assaulted but said she had suffered “substantial trauma”.
The court also heard that mother-of-one Berry had told her former colleague when they met that she herself had been raped. When the attack on the woman happened, Berry told her that she believed it could have been carried out by the same person.
In sentencing Berry, the judge repeatedly described as ”bizarre” her “irrational vendetta” and “malicious motivation”.
In a victim impact statement, the woman said that she now sufferers from panic attacks and locks herself into her home.
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