A man accused of pushing a schoolboy off a 100ft cliff after the youngster tried to stop him from molesting his sister said he went there because he was a ‘movie fan’.
Anthony Stocks, 54, told jurors on Wednesday that he wanted to take the boy to the cliff edge at Ovingdean to "see where they filmed Quadrophenia" - a 1979 film which ends with its protagonist, Jimmy Cooper, crashing his scooter over a cliff-top on the Brighton seafront.
Stocks told jurors that the underage girl he allegedly raped had touched his penis when he didn't want her to. Visibly shaking and fidgeting on the witness stand, he said: "I got fed up with it, with her touching me."
He said the girl, who was under the age of 13 at the time, touched him on several occasions "with her hands and mouth" and that he would push her away and call her a "stupid little b*tch." Asked by Mr Rutherford if he had himself done "anything bad or sexual" to the girl, Stocks replied: "No, never."
The 54-year-old has denied allegations that he groomed and molested the girl. He also told jurors he had never had a job in his life - apart from when he worked as an extra in the 2016 fantasy blockbuster Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and the 2018 space Western film Solo: A Star Wars Story.
Justine Lindsley, a mental health support worker who had regular conversations with Stocks following the incident, told jurors he was "very, very focused" on the girl - but never mentioned her brother or asked how he was recovering after his 100ft fall from a cliff, which Stocks claims was accidental.
She said: "He talked about how he and the girl wanted to be together all the time and that, one day, they would be married. He thought she listened to him and understood him the way nobody else did. He talked about needing to see her and missing her. He would speak about her a lot of the time. He never seemed interested in the boy, never mentioned him - which seemed strange as he was in hospital at the time."
The 10-year-old boy, who can't be named for legal reasons, was airlifted to St Georges' Hospital in Tooting, London, and placed into a medical coma for several weeks. Earlier during the trial, jurors heard that the schoolboy had found out the defendant was molesting his underage sister and began to "interfere" by staying present with his sister at all times in a bid to stop the abuse from happening.
But this annoyed Stocks, who allegedly decided to lure the boy on a trip to London to see the Chelsea football stadium - before taking him to Ovingdean near Brighton, Sussex, and pushing him over the edge of a cliff. A witness who was walking at the bottom of the cliffs said he heard a "shriek" and saw "a small shape fall as if thrown from the cliff." Stocks had reportedly approached the girl before the incident and told her: "I'm going to push him off a cliff. I want to get rid of him so we can be together."
Jurors also heard that Stocks had previously taken the boy to a quarry in Oxfordshire and allegedly "contemplated" pushing the boy off the cliffs there, before changing his mind.
Stocks, from Iceni Close in Goring-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, is standing trial accused of attempted murder, rape of a girl under 13, and a string of sexual assaults on the same girl in the early 2020s.