The former boyfriend of a teacher accused of having sex with a 16-year-old in an aircraft toilet told a court on Wednesday that their sex life at the time could not have been worse.
Eleanor Wilson, 29, is accused of having unprotected intercourse with the pupil on the British Airways flight home from a school trip to Swaziland.
The encounter is alleged to have led to Wilson becoming pregnant, Bristol Crown Court has heard.
The physics teacher broke the news to the pupil a month later, and said she had booked an abortion. Wilson’s ex-boyfriend Andrew Hall said he was having sex with her once every six months at the time, meaning it was highly unlikely the child was his.
Jurors were told the key stage 4 teacher was eight weeks pregnant when she rang her doctor on September 10, 2015. She had an abortion a fortnight later.
Mr Hall told the court he knew nothing of this until a detective investigating the allegations against her broke the news to him in December 2017.
Wilson’s defence barrister had suggested the unborn baby was his, and not the boy’s.
Giving evidence yesterday, Mr Hall said he broke up with Wilson in July 2016 because their relationship had become dysfunctional and aggressive.
He added: ‘In the last 18 months of our relationship we very rarely had intercourse and we never had unprotected intercourse. It would be incredibly unlikely for her to get pregnant. We were having sex every six months. Our sex life couldn’t have got worse.’
Mr Hall said he knew Wilson had been dismissed from her unnamed Bristol secondary school in May 2016, but he had no idea her dismissal was linked to an alleged affair with a student.
It also emerged that Wilson exchanged 339 texts, calls and multimedia messages with the pupil when she was still seeing Mr Hall – most were deleted before police could retrieve them.
In his evidence, Mr Hall recalled the day that Wilson was collected from an abortion clinic by a colleague. He said she had told him that she was suffering from bleeding and had gone to have a ‘blockage’ removed.
The first he heard about her alleged affair with a schoolboy was in June last year, when the outcome of her teacher disciplinary hearing was reported by the national press. Mr Hall said: ‘She suggested it had all been blown up by the media. It made me very upset. It demonstrated that she had been dishonest with me on more than one occasion.’
The court also heard a written statement from the father of the pupil, who cannot be identified for legal reasons.
He said ‘alarm bells’ rang when his son started meeting Wilson after the trip to Swaziland – once after lunch at a Nando’s, and twice during day trips to Tintern Abbey in South Wales and Ashton Court Estate in Bristol. His wife, the teenager’s step-mother, described Wilson as ‘fluffy and possibly a bit immature’.
She said she thought it odd that her son had come off the flight from Johannesburg with his clothes stained with red wine.
Wilson, of Dursley, Gloucestershire, denies four charges of sexual activity with a child by a person in a position of trust between August and September 2015.
The trial continues.
