Married teacher fled to France with pupil aged 15, court told

Jeremy Forrest, 30, booked himself and the teenager on a cross-Channel ferry to Calais after police questioned her about their relationship. The pair spent seven days on the run, a jury was told.

Lewes Crown Court in East Sussex heard that the relationship could not be compared with Romeo and Juliet, but amounted to Forrest committing a “gross and long-term breach of trust”.

Forrest and the girl – who had a crush on him, the court was told – had had sex in his marital home while his wife was away and in hotels while the girl told her mother she was staying with friends.

On the run in France, he and the girl dyed their hair to try to avoid detection.

Forrest even set up a French email account and bought a French mobile phone and bogus CVs were also drafted in an internet café to help the pair get jobs.

Prosecutor Richard Barton said Forrest used the alias Jack Dean and the girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, gave herself a fake name.

But an English bar owner to whom Forrest had applied for work recognised the pair from media reports, leading eventually to them being caught in the south western port city of Bordeaux on September 28 last year.

The girl described how she had “panicked” when she realised police and other authorities had been made aware of their relationship.

In a videoed police interview from October last year, which was played in court, the girl said she started getting feelings for her teacher following a school trip to Los Angeles.

“I found him attractive, I had had boyfriends and crushes on other people but he was older, it was a lot more different.”

She said that after the trip they started to flirt with one another.

Forrest broke down in tears in the dock at one point as the girl said he was a source of comfort to her as she dealt with personal issues.

The court heard the pair started exchanging tweets which developed into them sending each other private messages on the social networking site, and then text messages.

The girl said in the interview: “We were gradually getting more like into a relationship, and there were photos and stuff like that, and there were other text messages.

“But we didn’t start a relationship until the end of May and we decided that it was what we wanted to do. Around this time, we began to meet up outside of school.”

The court heard they had sex in his car and Forrest booked them into local hotels for overnight stays, including one across the road from the court.

Mr Barton said the girl was a willing participant in the pair fleeing the country, but that could not be used by Forrest as a defence to the abduction charge he faces.

Their disappearance led to several anxious days for the girl’s family and involved intensive searches by authorities on both sides of the English Channel, he added.

In the run-up to the disappearance, Mr Barton said repeated attempts were made by other teachers to dissuade Forrest from encouraging the girl’s infatuation with him amid increasing gossip.

“He gave the opinion that he did not seem worried about the crush,” he said. “Mr Forrest denied that there was anything behind the gossip at all.”

The trial continues.