A PUB customer has been jailed for sexually assaulting a young woman who he grabbed as she was smoking a cigarette in the beer garden. 

Brian Jury, from Newton Abbot, pulled the woman back by the hood of her jacket, rubbed himself against her from behind, touched her breasts and put a hand down her trousers. 

He told her she was hot and that he wanted to have sex with her and had been trying to chat her up earlier in the pub, where he sat next to her and rubbed his hand up her thigh. 

The victim managed to break clear and return to the Cavalier Inn at Torrington where she told friends about what had happened . She had no idea that Jury is a convicted rapist who was on the sex offenders’ register. 

Jury was thrown out of the pub and later claimed he had been beaten up in the car park by a group of customers. He denied the sexual assault and alleged the woman invented her complaint to explain the attack on him. 

He fled the scene and went back to a house in Torrington where he was living at the time. He has since moved back to his home town of Newton Abbot. 

The victim told Exeter Crown Court that she had been ‘creeped out’ by the way he came onto her and had got ‘really bad vibes’ off him even before he groped her. She said that after the assault he sniffed and licked his fingers and made a lewd comment.

In a victim impact statement she said: ‘It made me feel really disgusted. I feel on edge walking down the street because I am so worried I may see him again. It makes me jumpy.’

Jury, 36, of St Luke’s Road, Newton Abbot, denied sexual assault but was found guilty by a jury at Exeter Crown Court and jailed for two years by Recorder Mr Richard Stead.

He told him: ‘You were clearly heavily under the influence of alcohol when you started to take advantage of the victim and pestered her in the pub. You went outside and pulled her back towards you.

‘You humiliated her by assaulting her in such a public place where others might have been seen it. She was unable to respond as a result of being taken completely by surprise by your actions.

‘The most serious consideration is that you have yet again in an overbearing manner against a female. You have done so brazenly and without any regard for the victim.’

The jury reached their decision without knowing that Jury had been jailed for four and a half years in 2016 for raping a woman at her own home in Bideford. He was cleared of punching a woman who confronted him about his behaviour as he was being ejected from the pub.

Miss Zoe Kuyken, prosecuting, said Jury arrived with a friend at the Cavalier Inn on the night of January 21, 2023 and started talking to a woman who was playing darts. He sat down next to her when she stopped and made her feel uncomfortable by asking for her phone number and touching her leg.

She went out for a cigarette with a female friend and they were joined by Jury, who carried out the sexual assault outside in the darkness at a moment when her friend was not looking. 

She went back into the pub and texted her father to say she had just been sexual assaulted. She did not tell the landlord, but her friend did and confronted Jury, leading to a fracas that ended with him being ejected from the pub.

Former scaffolder Jury chose not to give evidence but told police in an interview that had done nothing wrong. 

Mr Brian Fitzherbert, defending, said Jury had suffered a head injury when he was 14 which has affected his memory.