TV comedian made partner list sexual history, abuse trial told

British comedian and television presenter Justin Lee Collins made his girlfriend recount every sexual experience she ever had for a notebook he kept as part of a campaign of domestic abuse, a court has heard.

The 38-year-old also made Anna Larke sleep facing him, a jury heard, rousing and criticising the video games PR worker if he awoke and found she had turned away from him.

Collins assaulted and harassed his girlfriend during their nine-month relationship last year, prosecutor Peter Shaw told St Albans Crown Court.

Collins, who came to fame with Channel 4’s The Friday Night Project, made Larke, 38, close her email, Facebook, and Twitter accounts after reading her messages. He made her throw away her DVD collection “on the basis she found some of the male actors in the movies to be attractive”, it is alleged.

Larke also told police Collins “has a problem with people of colour”, and the jury heard a recording of him accusing her of infidelities with men from ethnic minorities.

They met while Collins was still married. Collins “exhibited a desire to restrict” his girlfriend’s activities during the course of their relationship, Shaw said. “Significantly, Mr Collins resorted to compiling a dossier... The purpose of the notebook was to list every sexual experience with every one of Ms Larke’s previous lovers or partners. He would ask her questions and then write it down. She felt it was a disgusting thing to have to do and she was worried that she would lose him by doing it.”

The court was played a tape recording Larke made of a row between the pair at their home after they visited a pub in Jul 2011.

Collins accused her of “fancying” a younger man they saw hugging his partner while at the pub.

Clips were played in which Collins is heard shouting: “You fucked up at the pub. When you’re fucking with me, you look at the fucking ground, you look at a tree, you look at a bench, you look at any fucking inanimate object. You do not look at any other fucking human being, you slag. Do you understand?”

Mr Shaw added that Collins had threatened to “put her in hospital unless she shut up”.

Collins told detectives after his arrest Larke was the possessive one in the relationship and denied assaulting her “other than slapping her cheek to calm her when she’d been self-harming”.

The trial was adjourned until today.