A male paramedic who was allegedly groped by a drunk woman in an ambulance ‘allowed’ her to do it, his colleague said.
The colleague who was driving the ambulance when the alleged incident took place in July last year told Harrow Crown Court that the paramedic who as the target of the claimed sexual assault acted “inappropriately” and “unprofessionally” when the woman was touching him.
Deepa Meghani, who had been found unconscious in a London street allegedly groped the paramedic’s genitals through his trousers when she was being taken to Northwick Park Hospital, the hearing was told.
The woman also allegedly told the paramedic that he was ‘beautiful and sexy’ and asked him to ‘run away with her.’
Describing their ambulance journey, the alleged victim said: “She swore a few times at my crew mate, she called him a d***head on a few occasions. But we managed to set up that there were no immediately life-threatening conditions she was suffering from. The report that the patient had collapsed in the street and the fact she was intoxicated we could not leave her and we had to go to hospital.”
He said as she was “mumbling a fair bit,” he couldn’t hear what she was saying and “I was trying to understand her medical history.”
“Due to the fact that it was difficult to hear her I was trying to lean forward, but the patient was trying to reach my face which I was trying to bat off. And at one point she gave me what I can only describe as essentially a bear hug. She kept making inappropriate remarks that I was trying to shrug off and ignore. The patient said that I was beautiful and sexy and that we should run away together – which I thought to be inappropriate. She kept rubbing my leg, rubbing my thigh, which I kept telling her not to do. At one point she reached over and placed her hand on my leg, on my thigh, the inside of my thigh – I kept telling her not to do that, I said ‘don’t touch my thigh’ and ‘get off me stop touching me,’ I said that more than once.”
He said when the ambulance reached the hospital, he got up to disconnect the patient from the monitoring equipment only for her to reach over and grab his genitals.
“She reached up and grabbed my genitals, rubbing her hands against me,” he said.
But David Armour, also a paramedic who was driving the ambulance, told the court: “ I think it seemed very unprofessional and inappropriate not because of what he was doing, but what he was allowing. I have never seen that before where a colleague is dealing with an intoxicated patient being inappropriate, where he was allowing it to happen.”
However, Meghani, 33, denied sexual assault.
