Repeated False Rape Allegations: Sentences Must Reflect Cumulative and Foreseeable Harm

1. Introduction

This decision concerns the sentencing of repeated, deliberately false allegations of rape constituting offences of perverting the course of justice. Its central significance lies in the interaction between the Sentencing Council’s offence guideline, the totality principle, foreseeable harm and mitigation arising from low intellectual functioning and neurodivergence.

The offender pleaded guilty to ten counts arising from eight episodes involving ten falsely accused men. The principal allegations were made between December 2013 and August 2019, when she was aged between 18 and 24. The Crown Court at Bolton imposed an overall sentence of four and a half years’ imprisonment.

The Solicitor General sought leave to refer that sentence under section 36 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988, contending that it was unduly lenient. The Court of Appeal agreed and substituted concurrent sentences of seven years on every count.

The judgment does not establish a new offence or a fixed tariff for false allegations. Rather, it provides important guidance on applying the existing sentencing framework to a sustained series of serious offences: a sentence must reflect the cumulative wrongdoing, not merely the seriousness of a representative incident.

2. Factual and Procedural Background

The offending

The ten admitted counts formed part of an indictment containing seventeen counts. The prosecution accepted the pleas because they sufficiently represented the overall offending for sentencing purposes and because continuing with the remaining counts was not considered to serve the public interest. Those remaining counts were ordered to lie on the file; they were not convictions.

The admitted offending comprised the following episodes:

None of the falsely accused men was charged. Investigators identified inconsistencies, contradictory communications and other material undermining the allegations. Several men nevertheless spent time in police custody, while others attended voluntarily and were interviewed under caution. Investigations continued for substantial periods.

The distinction between not being charged and not being harmed was fundamental. The victim statements described damaged reputations, employment difficulties, broken relationships, interrupted contact with children and continuing psychological distress.

The offender’s circumstances

The offender had no previous convictions, although she had received a caution for unrelated offending. Psychological testing placed her full-scale IQ at 69, just below the threshold identified in the report for learning disability. There was also evidence of ADHD, emotional dysregulation and impulsivity.

The medical evidence required careful handling. References to emotionally unstable personality disorder were not always clearly attributable to a formal diagnosis, and the underlying records were heavily redacted. The appellate court therefore distinguished between established findings and less certain diagnostic references.

The clinical psychologist considered that impulsivity and emotional dysregulation could contribute to accusations made in response to perceived rejection or abandonment. However, the offender continued to insist during that assessment that the allegations were true. The pre-sentence report also recorded resentment towards the men and a wish that they should be hurt or punished.

The offender was first arrested in September 2019, appeared before the magistrates’ court in March 2024 and eventually pleaded guilty on the first day of trial. An updated probation report described difficulty adapting to imprisonment because of her intellectual and neurological difficulties and hostility from other prisoners.

3. Summary of the Judgment

The Court of Appeal held that the original sentence inadequately reflected both the seriousness of the individual offences and their cumulative scale.

• Most individual episodes were serious even within the highest guideline category and justified movement above its four-year starting point.
• The offending involved significant planning, notwithstanding its lack of particular sophistication.
• The harm included serious personal consequences, substantial diversion of police resources and damage to the effective prosecution of genuine rape complaints.
• Low IQ and neurodivergence materially reduced culpability, but did not explain away sustained, detailed and knowingly false accounts.
• Eight episodes involving ten victims over approximately five and a half years required a substantial adjustment for totality.

After allowing for youth, neurodivergence, other personal mitigation and the late guilty pleas, the appropriate overall sentence was seven years. The court granted leave, quashed the existing sentences and substituted seven years on each count, all concurrent: paragraphs 93–94.

4. The Sentencing Framework

The offence guideline

Perverting the course of justice carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. Both parties accepted that the offending fell within category 1A of the Sentencing Council guideline, which provides a four-year starting point and a range of two to seven years for a single offence.

The relevant indicators of high culpability were:

• conduct over a sustained period;
• sophisticated and/or planned conduct; and
• the seriousness of the underlying offence.

The relevant indicators of category 1 harm were serious consequences for an innocent person, serious distress and a serious impact on the administration of justice.

The guideline’s single-offence focus was critical. Its category range could not simply be treated as defining the appropriate overall punishment for ten convictions arising from eight separate episodes.

Actual, intended and foreseeable harm

Section 63 of the Sentencing Code requires consideration of harm that an offence caused, was intended to cause or might foreseeably have caused. Accordingly, the absence of charges against the falsely accused men did not confine seriousness to the consequences that actually occurred.

The allegations could foreseeably have led to prosecution and trial. If believed, the accusations concerned conduct attracting very lengthy prison sentences. Those potential consequences remained relevant even though the investigations stopped before charging: paragraph 76.

The original sentencing calculation

The sentencing judge regarded six and a half years as the minimum appropriate sentence before personal mitigation. He reduced that to five years for the offender’s circumstances and then applied a ten per cent reduction for the guilty pleas, producing four and a half years.

The Solicitor General argued that ten years before personal mitigation and plea credit would better reflect the overall offending. The Court of Appeal did not expressly adopt that proposed calculation. It instead identified seven years as the appropriate final sentence after all relevant allowances. The judgment should therefore not be treated as establishing an unexpressed ten-year starting point.

5. Analysis of the Court’s Reasoning

A. The individual offences were serious within category 1A

Category allocation was not the end of the exercise. The court considered that most episodes contained several features justifying movement above the four-year starting point: paragraphs 81–84.

In several instances the offender made an initial telephone complaint, repeated it to an attending officer and later supplied an elaborate account during an Achieving Best Evidence interview. Sometimes weeks separated the initial report from the later interview.

This persistence mattered independently of the overall length of the offending series. An individual episode could itself constitute conduct sustained over time, rather than a single impulsive statement.

B. Lack of sophistication did not negate planning

The defence relied on the accounts being contradictory, unsupported or readily disproved. The court accepted that the offences were not particularly sophisticated, but rejected the implication that they therefore lacked significant planning.

The guideline refers to sophisticated and/or planned conduct. These are related but distinct characteristics. A scheme may be clumsy or readily exposed while still being deliberately arranged.

The strongest example was the offender’s use of a pretext to bring AD to a public location for arrest. Her warning before the allegations concerning RL and CA, her expressed desire to punish the men and the detail of her later accounts also supported forethought.

The practical lesson is that sophistication measures something different from deliberation. Poor execution does not necessarily reduce planned misconduct to an unconsidered reaction.

C. Harm operated at three levels

Harm to the falsely accused

The court considered both the severity of individual consequences and their spread across ten victims. Custody and investigation were only part of the picture. The victim statements demonstrated continuing reputational, familial, occupational and psychological damage.

The court also identified distress arising from the prospect of giving evidence at the offender’s trial. Until her late pleas, victims faced the possibility of publicly revisiting the allegations years later, with attendant publicity and stigma, regardless of the eventual verdict: paragraph 85.

Harm to the administration of justice

The investigations consumed substantial police time and resources. The original police estimates covered all seventeen investigations underlying the indictment, rather than only the admitted offences. That qualification is important when describing the financial and operational burden.

The court’s reasoning went beyond expenditure. Time spent investigating fabricated allegations also reduces the resources available for other investigations, potentially harming other victims and the wider public interest: paragraph 86.

Harm to genuine complainants

The court reaffirmed established authority that knowingly false rape allegations can undermine genuine complaints. Their public visibility may distort jurors’ assessment of credibility and discourage genuine victims from reporting offences or continuing to trial: paragraphs 87–89.

This was an additional dimension of harm, not a substitute for examining the actual offending. Importantly, the decision concerned allegations admitted to have been deliberately false. It does not support treating an uncharged, withdrawn or unsuccessful rape complaint as inherently dishonest.

D. Neurodivergence reduced culpability, but did not eliminate deliberation

The court expressly accepted that low IQ and neurodivergence provided significant mitigation and genuinely reduced the offender’s culpability. The disagreement concerned the weight of that mitigation, not its legitimacy: paragraph 90.

The evidence of impulsivity could help explain an initial accusation following perceived rejection. It was less capable of explaining repeated, detailed accounts maintained over days or weeks. The offender also knew that men had been arrested and nevertheless continued making allegations.

Her statement that she had “got away with it” supported awareness of the criminal nature of her behaviour. The court therefore rejected the submission that her neurodivergence meant she would not have appreciated the harmful consequences of earlier allegations when making later ones.

The reasoning is individualised, not diagnostic. The judgment does not establish that planning automatically defeats mitigation based on ADHD, intellectual impairment or emotional dysregulation. It demonstrates that the asserted effect of those conditions must be tested against the particular conduct.

E. Totality required a substantial uplift

The decisive issue was the aggregate criminality. There were eight episodes, ten victims and a lengthy period of offending. Even if one episode justified a substantial sentence within category 1A, that did not adequately punish the entire series: paragraph 91.

Totality is often discussed as a restraint against excessive accumulation of consecutive sentences. Here, it also operated against under-punishment. A concurrent sentencing structure remained permissible, but its effective term had to reflect all the offences.

The Court of Appeal therefore retained concurrency while increasing the sentence on each count. The result was an overall seven-year term, not ten successive seven-year terms.

F. Undue leniency, not merely a different sentencing preference

The defence emphasised the sentencing judge’s evaluative discretion and familiarity with the offender. The appellate court nevertheless concluded that four and a half years was not merely lenient but unduly so.

Its intervention rested on the combined seriousness of the episodes, the breadth of actual and potential harm and insufficient recognition of totality. The judgment should not be read as authorising appellate intervention simply because another sentence might also have been reasonable.

6. Precedents Cited and Their Influence

Authorities concerning harm to genuine rape complainants

The court cited a line of authority supporting the wider harm caused by deliberately false allegations:

• R v C [2007] EWCA Crim 2551, paragraph 26;
• R v Beeton [2008] EWCA Crim 1421, [2009] 1 Cr App R(S) 46, paragraph 38;
• R v McKenning [2008] EWCA Crim 2301, [2009] 1 Cr App R(S) 106, paragraphs 16–17;
• R v Day [2009] EWCA Crim 2445, [2010] 2 Cr App R(S) 12, paragraph 15;
• R v England [2010] EWCA Crim 1408, [2011] 1 Cr App R(S) 51, paragraph 16; and
• R v Palmer [2018] EWCA Crim 1972, paragraph 15.

These cases were used as authorities for a principle of harm, rather than as numerical sentencing comparators. The judgment develops that principle principally through extracts from two decisions.

R v Beeton

In R v Beeton, Burnett J explained how public awareness of fabricated rape complaints could affect difficult credibility decisions. The concern was that fear of convicting an innocent person might, through distorted public perceptions, increase the likelihood of guilty offenders escaping conviction.

The present court adopted that reasoning to show why the consequences of the offences extended beyond the falsely accused men and the police investigations. The authority supported the recognition of harm to the wider functioning of rape prosecutions.

R v McKenning

In R v McKenning, Lord Judge CJ similarly emphasised that a false allegation affects genuine rape victims by making their complaints harder to prove. The present judgment used that reasoning to connect deliberate fabrication with the practical difficulties faced by genuine complainants and juries.

The other four authorities reinforced the continuity of this approach. Their individual facts and sentencing calculations were not examined in the supplied judgment, so no further factual analogy can safely be attributed to them.

Earlier sentencing decisions relied on by the defence

The defence cited:

• R v Vine [2011] EWCA Crim 1860;
• R v Costin [2018] EWCA Crim 1381; and
• R v Beal [2019] EWCA Crim 665.

The Court of Appeal considered that these decisions provided no real assistance. Each depended on its particular facts, and each preceded the specific offence guideline introduced in 2023: paragraph 92.

The distinction between the two groups of authorities is important. Earlier cases remained useful for identifying enduring forms of harm, but their particular sentence outcomes offered limited guidance once a dedicated guideline governed the sentencing exercise. The court did not declare those cases overruled or universally irrelevant.

7. Likely Impact and Limits of the Decision

Sentencing repeated offences

The decision provides a clear warning against using a single-offence category range as an effective ceiling for a substantial series. Courts must explain how the overall term reflects the number of episodes, the number of victims and the duration of the offending.

It does not prescribe a fixed increase per allegation or require consecutive sentences. Totality remains an evaluative and proportionate assessment, not an arithmetic exercise.

Assessing harm where no prosecution follows

The judgment confirms that an investigation ending without charges does not make the false allegation harmless or necessarily less serious. Actual consequences must be considered alongside intended and foreseeable consequences under section 63.

However, the decision does not equate an investigation with a conviction or assume that every possible consequence would inevitably have occurred. It requires a realistic appraisal of what the conduct could foreseeably cause.

Presenting psychological mitigation

Future sentencing submissions will benefit from evidence explaining how a condition affected the offender at relevant stages: the initial allegation, subsequent interviews and decisions to persist. A general reference to impulsivity may carry less explanatory force where the conduct was repeatedly reconsidered and maintained.

The uncertainty surrounding some medical references also illustrates the value of accessible records and clearly identified diagnoses. At the same time, the court’s express acceptance of significant mitigation prevents the decision from being read as dismissive of neurodevelopmental vulnerability.

Proper limits on the precedent

The seven-year sentence is not a universal benchmark for false rape allegations. It reflects an unusually extensive course of admitted offending. Nor does the judgment justify general suspicion of rape complainants: its reasoning expressly recognises the harm that such suspicion can cause.

8. Complex Concepts Simplified

Perverting the course of justice

Conduct intended to interfere with justice and tending to do so. A false accusation can constitute the offence even if nobody is ultimately charged or convicted.

Unduly lenient sentence

A sentence sufficiently inadequate to justify intervention under the statutory reference procedure, rather than simply one that another judge might have made longer.

Starting point and category range

Guideline tools for assessing an individual offence before completing the adjustments required by the offender’s circumstances, plea and overall offending.

Totality

The requirement that the overall sentence fairly reflects all the offences together, without either excessive accumulation or inadequate punishment.

Concurrent sentences

Sentences served at the same time. Here, ten concurrent seven-year sentences produced an overall term of seven years.

Foreseeable harm

Harm the offending could predictably have caused, even where intervention or other circumstances prevented it.

Achieving Best Evidence interview

A structured evidential interview used to obtain a witness’s account. In this case, repeated detailed accounts during such interviews demonstrated persistence beyond the initial accusation.

Counts lying on the file

Charges on which the prosecution did not proceed to trial. They are distinct from the counts resulting in convictions.

9. Conclusion

The judgment’s central lesson is that sentencing must capture the full scale of repeated wrongdoing. Serious individual allegations, sustained fabrication, multiple victims and foreseeable consequences cannot adequately be addressed by treating the case as essentially a single offence.

At the same time, low IQ, neurodivergence and youth remained substantial mitigating factors. The court’s task was to give them appropriate weight without allowing them to obscure deliberation and persistence. Its substitution of concurrent seven-year sentences illustrates that balance and reinforces the importance of cumulative, institutional and foreseeable harm in sentencing for perverting the course of justice.