A FORMER student of York St John University wept in the dock of the city’s crown court as a jury cleared him of raping an undergraduate.

Defence barrister Emma Rance had said in her closing speech the case was a warning to every man who went to a woman’s bedroom for a one-night stand and where the woman regretted it later.

The jury heard the woman had told Lewis Tappenden she wanted sex and had taken him back to her student accommodation after both had been out drinking at night in the city centre.

They also heard that the first-year undergraduate had told a flatmate earlier that evening that she had planned to “pull” a man and take him home with her.

Sometime after the couple arrived at her accommodation she banged on a flatmate’s door and urged him to get Mr Tappenden out of her room.

She claimed to police the sex act between them had become “weird” and she had told him to stop. But he hadn’t done so and had raped her twice.

“This case, the prosecution says, is a case of a woman’s right to change her mind and decide whilst she may initially have wanted something to happen, when it came to the crunch, she no longer wanted it to happen,” Tom Storey said as he opened the prosecution.

But Mr Tappenden told the jury the woman had never told him to stop.

“If she had, I wouldn’t have done anything,” he said in the witness box.

He also told the jury the allegations had “ruined his life”.

The jury returned their unanimous not guilty verdicts in under two hours. Mr Tappenden, now 24, of High Street, Huntingdon, denied both charges.

During the week-long trial, the jury heard how the woman and Mr Tappenden didn’t know each other before they both went out in the city centre separately in October 2015.

The woman told the jury that by the time she reached The Drawing Board in New Street at about 3am, she was “very drunk”.

Mr Tappenden said she had kissed him in the bar and outside, as they walked through the city centre, she had said she wanted to have sex.

He had also been drunk and had acted impulsively, he said.

The jury saw CCTV of the couple leaving The Drawing Board. The woman had claimed Mr Tappenden dragged her out, the defence said the video showed her leaving with him willingly.

They also saw CCTV of the couple’s progress from the club to the student accommodation off Walmgate and into a lift.

Mr Tappenden was arrested after his girlfriend saw a police public appeal.

The woman told police she didn’t know who he was.