David Carrick ‘told victim he was safest person she could be with’

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The serial rapist David Carrick told one victim he was a police officer and the “safest person” she could be with, before luring her back to his home and raping her at gunpoint, a sentencing hearing has been told.

The hearing at Southwark crown court comes after Carrick last month admitted 49 charges detailing 85 serious offences including rape, sexual assault, false imprisonment and coercive or controlling behaviour.

The court heard Carrick carried out a series of “violent and brutal attacks” while a serving police officer using “his power and control” to silence his victims.

Prosecutor Tom Little QC told the court that while serving as a Metropolitan police officer Carrick engaged in “a systematic catalogue of violent and brutal sexual offending”, over a “period of 17 years increasing in frequency … and with an increasing level of humiliation being inflicted.”

Carrick, 48, was a Met officer from 2001 until the day after he admitted his guilt last month.

In all he attacked 12 women from 2003 to 2020. Some of the offences took place in London but most were in Hertfordshire, with Carrick living in Stevenage.

Little told Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb – who will decide Carrick’s prison sentence – that some of the victims were older, some younger, but all were vulnerable in different ways.

He said: “[Carrick] frequently relied on his charm to beguile and mislead the victims in the first place and would use his power and control – which the prosecution say is linked in part because of what he did for a living – to stop them leaving or consider reporting him.”

After joining the Met, by 2009 Carrick was assessed as suitable to have a gun and joined the parliamentary and diplomatic protection command.

Little said: “It was a catalogue of violent and sexual offences perpetrated on multiple victims, whether he was in a controlling or coercive relationship with them or not or even if it was just a single occasion.”

The prosecutor added: “The reality was, if he had the opportunity, he would rape them, sexually abuse or assault them and/or humiliate them.”

The first victim whose case Carrick pleaded guilty to followed an attack in 2003. For the first time into the official record, Little read the details of her ordeal.

The woman was 20 and was on an evening out with friends in a London bar when she met Carrick. He claimed he lived nearby and was having a housewarming party and invited her back.

Little said: “The defendant told [the woman] that he was the safest person that she could be with and that he was a police officer.”

Back at the one-bedroom flat the woman tried to leave after a while, but Carrick would not let her.

Little said: “He grabbed her by the hair and put his hand round her mouth and dragged her backwards. He threw her on the bed. He held her down.

“He grabbed her arms. He had taken his shirt off. She bit his arm and he put his hand behind the bed. He searched for something and then put a black handgun to her head and said to her: ‘You are not going.’ She froze. The prosecution does not contend that it was a real firearm. [The woman] could not say whether it was or not.”

Little said the rape was prolonged and included explicit threats: “It carried on for some time. He put his hands around her throat and said he was going to be the last thing she saw.”

Carrick further sexually assaulted her, and then “he talked to her about her parents as if nothing has happened”.

The attack by Carrick then resumed. Later the then Met officer said to his victim: “…. If I let you go, you will not come back so this is the only way.”

Little said Carrick then claimed to have been watching the woman for some time, and when she asked him about the gun replied that “he liked guns and that he could not have her screaming the place down”.

Once the woman left Carrick’s flat she went to hospital where she was found to have suffered extensive injuries, including bite marks, bruising and internal bleeding. She had bruising on her ankles from being dragged.

She did not report the attack to police at the time, with a nurse telling her as she was young she may be better to forget about it and move on.

The hearing continues and is expected to hear further harrowing details of his attacks.