Joanne Young told a jury at Winchester crown court she woke in February 2023 to find a stranger in her bedroom after Philip Young allegedly arranged for him to be there. Her evidence, played to jurors on Wednesday, sits at the center of a trial involving four men accused of sexually assaulting her.
Young, 49, said she woke in the middle of the night feeling hazy, with a blindfold and restraints on, and that she removed them before realizing there was someone else in the room. She said she was naked and in shock, and that Philip Young, 50, told the second person to get down before he ducked out of sight. On another occasion, she said she came around while Philip Young asked, “Wouldn’t you like it if somebody else was here?”
The evidence matters because it goes beyond a single disturbing moment. Young said she and Philip Young had been married for 20 years and had three children, and that they were a straight, monogamous couple. She said he liked to restrain and blindfold her during sex, but that “it was always just the two of us” and that any other arrangement “was never part of our relationship and was never going to be.”
That is where the case turns. Young said Philip Young later admitted he had invited someone to watch them have sex, and she described asking him the next day, “What was that?” She also said he had advertised her on dating and swinging websites as a kink for both of them, while the trial also heard that he has pleaded guilty to multiple charges of abuse. Four men are accused of sexually assaulting her after being invited into the couple’s home by Philip Young, a version of events that clashes with the way she said the relationship was presented to her.
Young said the February incident left her thinking it was a one-off, but she later asked Philip Young whether it was the only time such a thing had happened. His answer, she said, was a blunt “No.” The jury has now seen her recorded interviews, and the case will be judged on whether that admission, and the pattern she described around it, is enough to prove what happened inside the home.
