SWNSThe “manipulative and predatory” actor who appeared on Netflix’s Sex Education has been found guilty of 26 sexual offences, including against children and two pupils to whom he gave acting lessons.
Alexander Westwood, from Albrighton in Shropshire, was obsessed with pornography from a young age, his trial heard.
He denied 26 offences, including raping a schoolgirl who came to him for acting lessons and sexually assaulting a child over an eight-year period.
He is due to be sentenced at Wolverhampton Crown Court on February 25.
Warning: Some people may find details in this story disturbing.
The jury heard that Westwood, who also appeared in the BBC series Doctors, was a “bad apple” and that his frequent sexual assaults were a “habit and way of life”.
“He’s a predator,” prosecutor Andrew Wallace said.
Speaking of two teenage girls who came to him for acting help, Wallace said one was “forced to act out the most inappropriate scenes”, while the second – following her “dream” of going from school to drama college in Birmingham – was being systematically abused. Before him.
“With fame looming, he met two impressionable 16-year-olds and used his august position to abuse them,” he said.
“Do you trust me?”
Between November 2020 and September 2021, Westwood raped and sexually assaulted a schoolgirl who attended the drama school as well as inciting her to engage in sexual activity.
“She had ambitions to become an actress. She arranged lessons with him, and over the course of time the defendant was able to perform the most horrific acts on her,” Wallace said.
He added that he was touching her, touching himself, and raping her.
Wallace said Westwood talked to her about a sex scene from the 1991 film Frankie and Johnny and a masturbation scene from Bridgerton.
He added that when she was interrogating and challenging him, he would say, “Do what your teacher says…Do you trust me?”
She was told not to tell anyone, and when she spoke out about not attending again, he presented her with a contract – “a coercive tool to keep her in line” – “restricting” her to 365 lessons, saying she would owe him as much as £18,000 or £36,000 if she broke it.
SWNSMr Wallace said he also threatened at one point to tell her manager.
He added that the victim was a girl who had a place at a theater school in Birmingham and “anything he could offer in acting and drama she could achieve and more”.
“Theatrically, he’s a nobody. She didn’t need him, but boy, did he need her.”
His abuse of the second teen overlapped, and occurred between May and August 2021.
She was offered a script depicting a father-daughter scene in Greek mythology and Westwood suggested she pose nude, but she declined, later describing it as “weird”.
