A FORMER prostitute was raped by a man who held her prisoner and threatened her with a screwdriver, a court heard yesterday.

The woman, a former drug-addict, told a jury at Teesside Crown Court that accused Anthony Curran said to her: "In six days it will be a year since your friend Vicky Glass was murdered. How do you know I won't do the same to you?"

Mr Curran, 21, denies the rape, which is alleged to have occurred on September 16 last year at his house in Gosford Mews, St Hilda's, Middlesbrough.

The woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, said she had met Mr Curran in town and he offered her £150 to spend the night with him.

They went to his house, she said, and once there he went upstairs, asking if she wanted to be paid before sex, but came back downstairs and pinned her to the settee.

She said: "He said he could do anything he wanted to me because I was a prostitute and a smack head. He said 'if you disappeared, who would be bothered?'."

He then picked up a screwdriver, she said, and held it to her throat which left her "terrified". She told the jury she was then raped twice. When he refused to let her go, she said, she ran for the back door but found it had been wedged shut.

The weeping woman said: "When I saw that I just thought he was going to kill me."

She was then taken to a bedroom, she said, and raped again. "I didn't deserve what happened to me whether I was a prostitute or not," she said.

Defence barrister Peter Johnson put it to the woman that she had invented the story and that the sex between her and the defendant was consensual.

She denied this and also denied the barrister's claim Mr Curran had paid her £20 for sex.

The case continues