A SEX pest has been banned from going to the University of York for life after he followed two women on its west campus.

Anthony Leslie Peter Armstrong, 38, was also jailed.

He told one woman “someone had told him to follow her” and when, shaking and crying, she sought help in the NISA shop in Vanburgh Way, Armstrong accused a man inside of raping her, said Philip Morris, prosecuting.

He knew none of the people involved.

He claimed to police later he knew “through telepathy” both women were willing to pay him £100 to have sex with him.

On other occasions, in Scarborough supermarkets, he had made lewd suggestions to a child shopping with her mother and to a supermarket manager who objected to him trying to set fire to a newspaper display.

Defence solicitor Adam Henry said Armstrong had long-standing mental health problems that meant he didn’t behave like a “normal” member of the public, particularly when he had not taken his medication or was having a crisis.

Armstrong, of no fixed address in Scarborough, pleaded guilty to five public order offences.

York magistrates described his actions as “vulgar” and “bizarre” and made a lifelong restraining order with the aim of keeping him out of the university by forbidding him from Main Street, Heslington, and Field Lane and University Way, both off Hull Road.

They jailed him for 16 weeks, consecutive to a sentence he was currently serving for other offences.

Mr Morris said Armstrong caught a bus to the university on April 27 and sat next to the first student, although there were other free seats.

She asked him to move so she could get off and he then followed her. She got away by going into a department building and he started following another student who came out of the building.