Philip Pickett, who taught at a top school once attended by stars such as Orlando Bloom and Daniel Craig, has been jailed for 11 year for luring schoolgirls into sound-proof rooms so he could rape them.
Philip Pickett, from Oxfordshire, was found guilty at the Old Bailey of two rapes and two indecent assaults on victims between 1979 and 1983.The 64-year-old taught for 25 years at Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London
The court heard how Pickett lured vulnerable pupils into practice rooms where no one would hear their screams as he shut the door, turned out the light and assaulted them.
The first victim, who was 16 at the time of the attack, reported Pickett to officers in Suffolk, who referred the complaint to the City of London Police.
She went to the Guildhall School in 1978 as a sixth-form student to learn the recorder with Pickett.
During a lesson he asked her to take her top off, suggesting she needed to work on her breathing, then ordered her to lie on the floor where he indecently assaulted her.
In a lesson the following week, she was raped by Pickett. Afterwards, the victim told her mother she did not want to have lessons again.
After Pickett was arrested over the 1978 assault in August 2013, more women came forward, resulting in charges related to two more victims who were 21 and 17 at the time.
The 17-year-old woman told her parents of the attack, and they wrote to her school.
After taking a significant length of time to respond, the school said it had not received any other complaints about Pickett and suggested their daughter study elsewhere.
After he was convicted on February 10, Pickett's defence team tried to delay sentencing to accommodate Pickett's commitment to arranging three music festivals.
But Judge Wide rejected it, saying the defendant had his "head in the sand" and carried on as if nothing had happened.
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