A MAN has been jailed for three years for having sex with a girl of 14 he met on Facebook.

Ryan Fleming, 26, was labelled “boastful and arrogant” by the sentencing judge at Bradford Crown Court yesterday.

He was convicted by a jury after a week long trial of two offences of sexual activity with a child in 2013, and cleared of a further similar charge.

Fleming, of Featherbank Terrace, Horsforth, befriended the girl on Facebook.

They shared an interest in gigs and concerts and he told her he was 18, when he was in reality 22, prosecutor Sophie Drake said.

Fleming had sex with the girl twice at her home before she “dumped” him when she discovered his true age.

Fleming was on licence at the time after serving a 22-month jail sentence for falsely imprisoning a youth and sexually abusing him.

The court heard he and two other young men stripped their victim and shaved his head before Fleming walked him home, punching and kicking him on the way.

After the jury’s majority verdicts, Fleming’s solicitor advocate, Ray Singh, said the sexual activity was consensual and his client had been cleared of one of the offences.

Mr Singh accepted that an immediate prison sentence was inevitable. He said Fleming’s previous conviction arose out of a prank that went too far.

Judge Jonathan Durham Hall QC made a Sexual Harm Prevention Order for ten years banning Fleming from having any future contact with his victim, or any unsupervised contact with children under 16. He accepted that Fleming and the girl became Facebook friends because of their shared interest in music. She was “articulate, intelligent and mature.” But Fleming lied about his age and he knew the girl was 14 because her mother told him.

Judge Durham Hall said Fleming had fought the case very determindly. A guilty plea would have shown some degree of remorse.

He described his previous conviction as “troubling.”

Telegraph & Argus