A pervert who tricked hotel staff into giving him a key to a drunk woman’s bedroom by posing as her boyfriend has been jailed for four years. Kieran Sodhi, 30, let himself into the victim’s room intending to commit a sexual offence following a boozy work function in January last year.
Warwick Crown Court heard the woman, in her 20s, awoke in the morning to find herself naked apart from her knickers and the defendant sitting on her bed. Married Sodhi had tricked hotel staff at at Chesford Grange Hotel in Kenilworth, Warks., into handing over a key card to her room by pretending to be the victim’s partner.
The court heard “the only reasonable inference” was that Sodhi had taken off her clothing while she was “close to incapable of speaking” and nearly unconscious. Prosecutor Alex Warren said Sodhi had “intended to commit a sexual offence on her or an offence of voyeurism by watching her asleep”.
Last month he was found guilty of trespass with intent to commit a sexual offence but a jury failed to reach a verdict on a charge of sexual assault. On Monday (29/7) Sodhi, of Littleover, Derby, was jailed for four years and ordered to register as a sex offender for life.
Sentencing, Judge Andrew Lockhart QC said:
This has turned her whole world upside-down. She doesn’t know what happened in that room, and she has to live with that.
I take the view you decided she was an attractive young woman, and you were keen to be with her. Any man would have known she was close to incapable of speaking. She had to be taken to her room, close-on unconscious.
So keen were you to commit a sexual offence that you went to that room twice, having got the key. There was a significant degree of planning, especially for the second visit. My findings are that you entered that room intending to commit a sexual offence. You did not do so, but it must have been very frightening for her.”
The court heard Sodhi was staying at the hotel for a works do, and the woman, who cannot be identified, was also attending a function there and staying overnight. She had too much to drink and, incapable of standing unaided, was helped back to her room by two men from her party at around 1am.
Sodhi, who had met her on a previous occasion and had been talking to her during the evening, had a room on a different floor. But as the two men were putting her on the bed, fully clothed, they saw Sodhi outside her room, and he asked whether she was OK.
He insisted he would get some from the bar, and they were so concerned about his intentions, they waited in the room for 20 minutes before leaving her.
Mr Warren added:
She has no recollection of being put to bed. The next thing she remembers is waking up the next morning to the sound of a mobile phone alarm.
She realised it was not her phone, and that there was somebody else in her room with her. It was the defendant.
She was under the covers in bed, undressed and wearing only her knickers, and the defendant was sitting on the other side of the double bed, fully clothed.”
Police checked CCTV recordings which showed Sodhi going to her room after she had been taken there. He then went to the reception desk where he claimed to be her partner and asked for a duplicate key card to her room.
Having seen details she had given at check in, Sodhi could answer a security question about her home address, and was given a key card to her room. In a victim impact statement, the woman said her life had been going well for her, but all that changed after that night, and she no longer enjoys going out.
The prosecutor added: “She wakes at night crying because she doesn’t know what happened to her that night.”
Sodhi claimed he had no sexual intent and had acted out of concern for her wellbeing, because a cousin of his had died after choking on his own vomit while drunk. He denied lying to get a key card, claiming he had given an honest account to the receptionists he spoke to.
Nick Devine, defending, said there were nine references which “attest to someone who is held in high regard within his religious and local community.”
He added:
The consequences of this conviction are profound and will live on beyond the inevitable custodial sentence.
While his wife attended the trial, the conviction has caused tension within the family.”
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