A teenager living in Hove raped two underage schoolgirls in separate attacks, a jury has been told.
Karam Majdi, who is believed to be 19, denies raping one girl from Brighton and another from Bognor last autumn.
He said that he thought that both girls were old enough to have sex and give their consent.
Majdi was living in Seafield Road, Hove, when he met the first complainant, a 15-year-old girl from Brighton, through social media.
He also met the second girl, who was 14 at the time and is now 15, through social media where he went under the name Mano Love.
Henrietta Paget, prosecuting, told a jury at Brighton Crown Court that Majdi met the first girl near the Tesco supermarket, in Church Road, Hove, one evening.
They went to the beach before going to Majdi’s flat. He told her that it was too late to get a bus home although this wasn’t true.
In his bedroom, Ms Paget said that Majdi held the girl down by the wrists and pulled down her trousers.
She struggled and managed to pull them up at one point before he using his greater strength to force himself on her.
Majdi told the court, through an interpreter, that they did have sex but that the girl had initiated sex with him.
Her parents were worried that she had not returned home at 9pm, when she was expected, and they reported her missing to Sussex Police.
After frantic efforts to find her, she was found in distress and in floods of tears in Churchill Square, Brighton, late the next afternoon.
When the police were called, she was reluctant to say exactly what happened in case she got into trouble. But the full story emerged over the next couple of weeks.
In the second case, Majdi met the 14-year-old girl at East Croydon railway station with a couple of others.
They went to a hostel where a friend was staying and where, Ms Paget said, they smoked cannabis, with the complainant even taking cocaine.
Ms Paget said that Majdi again forced himself on the 14-year-old girl and that he ignored her requests to stop.
She tried to push him away but he held her legs and hips hard enough to leave bruising.
Again, Majdi said through his interpreter that the girl had initiated sex with him and that it was consensual.
The closing statements by Ms Paget and defence counsel Tom Nicholson Pratt are due on Tuesday, along with Judge Shani Barnes’s summing up.
If he had happened to be white,12,with learning difficulties’ anf the victim were not while, you’d be free to do it again
no the law is the same for evey one age gender race have nothing to do with it stop defending rapists
@Angry-hurt&lied2+about Not quite sure what your point is. Are you saying the judicial system is prejudiced against non-Caucasians, teenagers/adults and people who don’t have learning difficulties? Very odd comment.