A Portslade barman charged with sexually abusing two girls has gone on trial at Hove Crown Court.
John Guile, 49, also known as John Gosling, is accused of a string of sexual offences against the girls – one who was 11 and the other 13.
The last of the offences with his older victim was alleged to have been committed four years before the first sexual assault of the younger girl.
Sarah Lindop, prosecuting, said: “These two girls are unknown and unrelated to one another.”
Guile, of Abinger Road, Portslade, befriended one of the girls at the Southwick pub where he worked, the Pilot, which closed in 2010.
He groomed the girl, the jury was told, and while working at the Romans pub, also in Southwick, he invited her there and told colleagues that she was his daughter.
Once they were in his upstairs flat, Guile started to kiss the victim, who cannot be named for legal reasons, and took off her clothes before abusing her.
Miss Lindop said: “She wasn’t necessarily an unwilling participant but she was quite clearly under-age.”
The girl, now 26, said that Guile later took her back to a shared flat in Old Shoreham Road and even abused her in a skate park, in Southwick.
She said that meeting up with him had been exciting at that age but the sexual abuse left her feeling uncomfortable,
In a video-recorded interview the victim dabbed away tears as she described what Guile had done to her.
She then said: “I was wondering why I was there. I had mixed emotions. Part of me felt scared. Part of me felt happy and part of me felt confused.”
When she went home that evening, she said, “I went into my bedroom and cried.”
But they met up again. The victim said: “There was something about him that I liked – things I suppose he said. He would compliment me and tell me things that I wanted to hear.
“I just wish I’d known at that age that it wasn’t normal and he probably only wanted one thing.”
In the years since, she had told just a few people about what had happened before contacting the police, not having felt able to talk about what Guile had done.
But out of the blue, he sent her a friend request on Facebook. And by the time she contacted the police, she said, “I felt ready to talk about it.”
Guile denies 11 counts of sexually abusing the two girls, over a period stretching from July 2009 to April 2019. His trial started yesterday (Thursday 4 May).
He is being tried by a jury of six men and six women, with Judge Stephen Mooney presiding and Andrew Selby representing Guile.
The trial continues.
