Two Italian students who raped a woman in a London nightclub have been jailed for their brutal attack.
Last month Lorenzo Costanzo, 26, and Ferdinando Orlando, 25 were found guilty of raping the 25-year-old school teacher who they’d met on a nightclub dance floor just six minutes before.
CCTV showed them taking it in turns to kiss her before leading her to a store room where they raped her twice each and filmed the attack.
They then led her out of the store room and abandoned her in the toilets and were then caught on camera high-fiving and hugging each other.
The woman was discovered an hour later and needed surgery on the injuries she sustained during the brutal attack.
Sentencing the two men to seven-and-a-half years each, Judge Giles Curtis-Raleigh said they had committed ‘very serious offences’ against ‘an entirely innocent and vulnerable young woman’ reports the BBC.
In an impact statement the victim said: ‘When I found out more than one man was involved I felt violently ill with the thought that two men did something this horrible … to me.
‘I truly struggle with how two humans could behave like such animals to another person and think of that as funny and like a badge of honour.’
The pair admitted to later watching the footage back on their phone and making lewd gestures and re-enacting what they’d done.
The court heard that on February 25 2017, the victim had been attending a friend’s birthday in London. She described herself as 10 out of 10 on the scale of drunkeness after the attack.
She said: ‘I remember being very drunk and falling over a lot and then I was in the toilets of the club in so much pain, not wanting to get out and then I remember being on the street, sitting on the sidewalk.
‘I was very swollen, I could barely walk and there was a lot of bruising. I was very scared.’
Costanzo and Orlando’s defence team tried to claim that the students had a ‘naive view of consent’ because they come from a ‘different cultural background’ but the judge said that they had sex with her ‘at a time when she was incapable of consenting.’
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