Gay UK 'Photographer' Drugged, Raped Straight Victims, Court Told

A British man charged with drugging and raping men he approached to be photo models is on trial, with the court hearing that the accused "is a gay man who preferred to have sex with straight men without their being aware of it," local news source Bristol Live reports.

45-year-old Nigel Wilkinson allegedly lured a number of men to his home in Bristol, England, between 2014 and 2016. Wilkinson supposedly told the men that he was a photographer interested in taking athletic portraits, but he's now charged on six counts of drugging his purported victims with the intention of sexually assaulting them, the article said.

Prosecutor Sarah Regan told the court that Wilkinson's supposed expertise as a professional photographer was used by the defendant as "a vehicle for the depraved yearnings" of the accused, the BBC reported.

Multiple men alleging to have been drugged and assaulted claimed that Wilkinson gave them drinks that made them groggy and knocked them out, the article said. Police reportedly found intimate pictures of the victims they said they did not remember being taken and had not consented to.

Wilkinson's alleged crimes first made headlines in the summer of 2016. At that time, UK newspaper The Guardian said that Wilkinson used social media to contact the men and convince them to travel to his home, ostensibly for photo shoots.

The BBC article reported that a 19-year-old man who had stayed at Wilkinson's home contacted his girlfriend and told her that he suspected he had been drugged. When police went to Wilkinson's home they found the man in question still there and took him to a hospital for medical testing. The results indicated the man had ingested a sedative of some sort.

Two months later, when police returned to Wilkinson's home to place him under arrest, they found another man, a 23-year-old, sleeping there; he, too, was taken to hospital, where tests indicated he may have been drugged and raped, the Guardian article reported, adding that yet a third man, also 19 years old, was identified and tested at some point during the investigation. His results, too, indicated that he had ingested drugs.

Wilkinson entered a guilty plea in 2016 on several counts of drugging his alleged victims with the intention of sexually assaulting them, and also pled guilty to two counts of rape, the Guardian article said.