A WOMAN accused of sex offences against a young boy cried with relief in the dock as a jury ended her two-year ordeal.

Jurors at York Crown Court unanimously returned four not guilty verdicts on charges that Melissa Drummond had indecently assaulted a young boy.

She had told them she hadn’t known the boy, now a man, until he was at secondary school, and had never behaved inappropriately towards him.

The alleged victim claimed to the jury that he had enjoyed going public with his allegations in 2015, 30 years after he claimed the offences had been committed.

A couple of days later, he went to the police to repeat the allegations.

Defence barrister Michael Rawlinson said he was an attention seeker and a fantasist who could not distinguish fact from fiction.

The jury heard the man had had inpatient hospital treatment for delusions caused by drug-induced psychosis and had been drinking when he first made the allegations publicly.

Mrs Drummond, 53, of St Stephens Road, Acomb, denied all the charges.

When she initially heard the allegations, she couldn’t believe them, and thought they were a drunken outburst.

Two months later, she was arrested by the police on suspicion of being a sex offender and was interviewed under caution.

She told them she didn’t know the man at the time he said the abuse happened and that when he was in his teens, he had had a schoolboy crush on her and she had had to tell him she didn’t love him, remind him that she was married and that he was still at school.

But nearly a year after she was first arrested, officers charged her with indecently assaulting him and she appeared before York Magistrates Court.

She has been on bail for nearly a year and had to wait 11 months between entering her not guilty plea at her first appearance before York Crown Court and standing trial.

Halfway through the trial Mr Rawlinson tried to get the judge to throw the case out on the grounds of no case to answer.

He told Recorder Nicholas Barker that the man’s evidence was so contradictory that no jury could be sure that the offences had been committed.

But the judge said the trial must continue.

Finally, at the end of the three-day trial, the jury was sent out to decide its verdicts just before lunch.

As soon as the judge returned to court after lunch, jury members filed in to deliver their unanimous verdicts.

Mrs Drummond was so overcome with relief at the end it was some time before she was able to leave the dock.