A MARTIAL arts instructor has denied abducting a woman in York and repeatedly raping her.

Mark Anthony Thompson, 37, claimed the student, whom he had not met before, willingly got into his car and initiated sex sessions in Hungate and James Street.

When she said she liked driving, he took her to Kirkham Priory where they spent six or seven minutes before returning to York where he dropped her off near her home, he told Teesside Crown Court.

He also claimed she comforted him when he told her of the problems he had had a few hours before they met when he went into the bedroom of a second woman when she was asleep.

Thompson, of Hospital Fields Road, off Fulford Road, York, denies nine charges against four different women including kidnap and rape allegedly committed between 2009 and 2013.

Prosecution barrister Shaun Dodds, after hearing his account of the incidents in which the women allege he committed sexual crimes, said to Thompson: “Women effectively are throwing themselves at you?”

He replied: “Call it what you will.”

In his defence, Thompson alleged he was walking through York after 3am on October 29, 2013, when he saw the woman walking towards him with her jacket open.

He claimed she was flirtatious and smiled and said he offered to take her home and she agreed.

He said that didn’t strike him as surprising.

He is alleged to have grabbed another woman as she walked alone in Coney Street late at night in February, 2009.

It was claimed that he put his hand over her mouth, groped her and tried to undo her trousers.

She allegedly screamed and he was arrested for attempted rape.

Thompson told the jury that woman had been with a group and grabbed him and kissed him after they had been talking.

He denied she screamed or that he had behaved sexually towards her.

She had been behaving like a “crazy girl”, he alleged.

He said that in July 2013, another woman threw her arms around him and tried to kiss him on the dance floor of Vudu a couple of hours after they had been introduced by a mutual friend.

He denied going to her house after dropping off a couple of friends later.

On allegations relating to another woman on the night of October 28 last year, he claimed he had been resting at the house, needed the toilet and decided to see if she was awake.

She saw him and screamed and her housemate, who was a friend of Thompson’s, came in and asked what was going on.

The friend didn’t want to hear his explanation, he alleged, and instead ordered him out of the house.

Thompson claimed he didn’t want to go home to his wife because he knew he would have problems, so he decided first to go for a drive, then go to a nightclub.

The trial continues.