‘Privileged’ Edinburgh University student jailed for ‘disgraceful’ sex attack loses release bid

A privileged university student has lost a bid to secure his release from jail days into his prison sentence for a sex attack on a woman undergraduate.

A general view of the High Court in Edinburgh.

Felix Beck was jailed for three years on January 17 for the assault that left his teenage victim injured and traumatised.

Beck’s defence solicitor advocate John Scott QC made an application to have him freed on interim liberation pending a proposed appeal against his conviction and sentence.

But the move was rejected by judge Lord Turnbull following a hearing at the High Court in Edinburgh today.

Edinburgh University student Beck, 22, had denied assaulting the 18-year-old fellow student at her hall of residence on October 19 in 2016, but was convicted of the offence by a jury at the High Court in Edinburgh last year.

During the attack he grabbed her by the neck and pushed her onto a bed and bit her on the legs and private parts.

The woman told his trial: “I said ‘Jesus Christ, it looks like you have beaten me up’. He laughed and said it was fine.”

“When he took his hand off my neck I told him I didn’t like that,” she said.

The assault was committed on Beck’s first meeting with the sexually inexperienced woman he had contacted through a dating website.

The victim subsequently suffered from depression and was diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder.

She left Edinburgh University as she felt unable to continue with her studies and had to begin again at another university.

Lord Uist, the trial judge who jailed Beck earlier this month at the High Court in Aberdeen, told him: “You have only yourself to blame for the situation in which you find yourself which arises out of the lifestyle you were leading and what I regard as your sense of sexual entitlement and your arrogance.”

Lord Uist told Beck: “You come from a comfortable, indeed, privileged background.”

“The way in which you treated your victim during and after this violent attack was callous and disgraceful,” said the judge.

Beck, formerly of Old Infirmary Lane, in Edinburgh, sobbed in the dock as he was jailed. He was also placed on the sex offenders’ register indefinitely.

Beck’s appeal grounds have yet to go through a sifting process and if they pass that his lawyers could make a fresh bid to secure his release ahead of a full hearing.

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