One-legged Brit driving instructor groped girls ‘as penalty for mistakes’

LONDON - A British driving instructor groped four women learners ‘as penalty for mistakes’.

A court heard that he would turn up the heating in his car so that his students would take off their tops, reports the Daily Mail.

Barry Morgan, 58, warned the learners that he would ’squeeze them’ if they made driving errors and then grabbed their breasts as they were driving.

The former soldier, who lost a foot in the Falklands War, tried to put his hand in a terrified 17-year-old’s bra and ran his hand up her leg to grope her upper thigh, Plymouth Crown Court was told.

And he warned another woman in her 20s: “If you do it wrong again I’ll squeeze your wobbly bits” and then touched her left breast before she elbowed him away.

The court heard that Morgan had been a driving instructor for 17 years before the first complaint.

The police then checked with other learners and found three women with almost identical experiences.

Morgan, from Heybrook Bay, Plymouth, admitted six sexual assault charges.

He was jailed for 12 months, suspended for two years, ordered to do 240 hours unpaid community work and sign the sex offenders’ register for 10 years.

“The traumatic and distressing effect is apparent from the victims’ statements and in the case of the young girl it is continuing to cause her difficulties,” Judge Francis Gilbert, QC, told him while delivering the verdict.

“Your behaviour was premeditated, as is obvious from the fact that you were operating to a pattern of behaviour like turning up the heat and telling them to take off their top clothing,” he added.

“Morgan accompanied the touching with banter, saying he was squeezing them as some kind of penalty for mistakes in their driving,” said Jonathan Barnes, prosecuting.

“The pupils by and large felt too intimidated to make an issue of it although some made plain their disapprobation, but it did not cause him to desist. Most continued with the lessons because they had paid in advance,” he added.

Morgan was sacked by the British School of Motoring and has been unemployed ever since. (ANI)