I insisted married teacher go to France with me, says teen pupil

An English schoolgirl allegedly abducted to France by her married maths teacher has told a court that he came with her because he feared she might commit suicide.

The girl was aged 15 when she started a sexual relationship with Jeremy Forrest, 30, after developing a crush on him at Bishop Bell C of E School in Eastbourne, East Sussex.

Fearing they were about to be exposed, Forrest booked them on a cross-Channel ferry from Dover to Calais on September 20 last year before spending seven days on the run in France.

The girl, now aged 16, said that she had been experiencing personal problems in the months up to the relationship with Forrest.

This included her mother going through a divorce and then her mother falling pregnant with a new partner.

The court heard the pair agreed to go to France after the girl had her phone seized by police investigating rumours of a relationship between them.

The girl said she planned to run away but Forrest agreed to come with her to prevent her from getting into danger.

She said: "He tried to persuade me not to run away."

She added: "I said I was going and nobody was going to stop me. I was very determined and once I had an idea in my head nobody was going to stop me, not Jeremy, not anybody."

"He was concerned that if I went on my own I would be in danger, it would be a better idea if he came with me. I was very pleased."

"If Jeremy had said he wasn't coming with me, I would have dreaded what kind of situation I would have been in."

Describing her mood at the time, she said: "I felt very low indeed, I didn't know what to do, I was very desperate."

When asked if she felt suicidal by defence counsel Ronald Jaffa, the girl, who chose to give her evidence in court for the first time rather than by videolink, said: "Yes".

The girl told the court that Forrest repeatedly asked her to return home but she refused.

She said: "He was saying: 'This isn't going to end very well' but if I was insisting that things could happen to me as a result of this, we had to go."

She added: "Numerous times on the way to France he would say he would give me the money so I could go home but I didn't want to go home."

The girl said Forrest was in tears as they drove to France.

She said: "He was very worried, he was very emotional. I do not think he wanted to take me anywhere but I was insisting, I was adamant we had to go, otherwise I was afraid of what would happen to both of us.

"I was concerned about Jeremy getting into any trouble. If Jeremy got into trouble, I do not know what I would do."

She said she felt she had to run away because she did not want her mother to find out about a previous relationship as well as other personal issues she had been going through.

Speaking of her relationship with her mother, she said: "I didn't get on with her very well, I didn't like her, she wasn't supportive."

She added: "When there's a divorce going on, the attention in the family is on the parents, not the children."

She said she also felt that her mother might throw her out of home.

The girl said she started to develop a crush on Forrest after he helped her with her personal problems. She said it was during a school trip to Los Angeles in February 2012 that she began to confide in him.

She said he would try to get her to seek help from school counsellors or external support services.

She said: "He was very encouraging to get help and seemed very worried about it and didn't want to let the situation go, he really wanted to do something about it."

She added that among her problems was a tendency to have suicidal thoughts.

She said that since Forrest began to give her advice and support, her attendance and grades at school had improved.

She said she had previously fallen in with a "bad crowd" with whom she would "take drugs" and get into trouble.

She said she was often in detention after school. She said: "He (Forrest) also said I should talk to my mum about the situation."

She said that on the way home from LA she had held hands with Forrest because she was having an anxiety attack because of her fear of flying.

She said: "It started on the first journey, I started having panic attacks on the flight. I grabbed a teacher's hand in front of me and also grabbed Jeremy's at the same time as I was really worried and needed someone to hold on to.

"On the way back I was sat next to Jeremy. I remembered he had been nice to me, I thought it would be a good way to relieve any anxiety or stress."

She added: "It wasn't hand-holding, it was squeezing hands. It wasn't affectionate, it was more caring."

The girl said she felt "manipulated" by the police after she was brought back to England from France. She said she had not been happy with the evidence she gave in her second interview with officers.

She added that she felt that "if I didn't comply with what they (the police) were doing, I faced arrest".