Man cleared of rape to stand trial for 11 alleged offences

He was formally acquitted of the historic sexual attack by judge Lord Kinclaven at the High Court in Livingston.

But 62-year-old James Moore is still on trial for a further 11 offences, including raping the same alleged victim.

The jury has heard evidence from the woman he’s claimed to have raped that Moore was a controlling drunk, quick to anger and resort to violence.

Her daughters testified that he physically and sexually abused them while they were young.

They said he hit them with a leather belt and groped them in their beds.

Moore took ill during the trial as one of his alleged victims told how he’d sexually abused her when she was aged six.

The nursing assistant, now aged 51, said Moore groped her while he and his wife were babysitting her at her former home in Blackburn, West Lothian, in the early 1970s.

She claimed Moore had been reading her and her five year old sister a bedtime story when he sexually assaulted her.

She said she was too scared to tell other members of her family although she eventually told her mother what had happened.

Another grown woman, now aged 35, wept as she recalled how Moore secured her bedroom door by tying a rope to the banister so she couldn’t go to the bathroom.

She said she was so scared by the “threat” of a belt he hung over her bedroom door she urinated in her pencil case rather than leave the room.

The woman he is accused of raping said he constantly accused her of going with other men and didn’t even allow her to go out to a Tupperware party.

She claimed he raped her after she refused to have sex with him because her children were sleeping in the same room.

One other daughter said she’d heard her mum saying: “No’ the weans, the weans,” before the alleged rape incident.

In addition to the remaining rape charge in 1989, Moore is accused of using lewd, indecent and libidinous practices towards the six year old between 1971 and 1973.

He faces three charges of using lewd and indecent sexual behaviour towards two under-age girls aged between 11 and 13 at addresses in Stirlingshire and West Lothian on various occasions between January 1985 and June 1989.

He is also charged with assaulting the two girls and a teenage boy by striking them on the legs or body with a belt to their injury.

He further denies kicking a 16-year-old girl on the body to her injury at an address in Whitburn between April 1997 and April 1998.

Moore, of Thornbridge Square, Falkirk,is also claimed to have breached the peace on various occasions over a 24 year period by throwing food and drink at walls, shouting and swearing, smashing windows and calling people derogatory names.

He pleads not guilty to all the charges and has lodged a special defence claiming that any sexual contact with the alleged rape victim was consensual.

When he was interviewed by police he dismissed the allegations as “rubbish” and “utter nonsense”.

He declined to give evidence in his own defence.