Tyrion Davis was given a 10-month sentence and dishonourably discharged from the US air force. Illustration: Guardian Design/The Texas public sex offender website/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Tyrion Davis was given a 10-month sentence and dishonourably discharged from the US air force. Illustration: Guardian Design/The Texas public sex offender website/Getty Images Base justice US military ‘They said: wear angelic white’: British women who accused US airman of rape tell of American military trial Two women who alleged they were raped by Tyrion Davis in Suffolk had to testify at an invasive court martial on a US base
Prefer the Guardian on Google M inutes after fleeing the home of an American airman, Rebecca called 999 in tears to report that he had raped her. She recalls vomiting at a police station in Suffolk as she described being repeatedly and violently attacked.
Officers took her to a sexual assault referral centre for an intimate examination. There, a nurse measured and photographed her injuries, including bruises and bite marks on her neck.
“I didn’t feel like I was a human,” said Rebecca, whose name has been changed to protect her identity. “I know that sounds really extreme but I genuinely looked in the mirror and I didn’t recognise myself.”
Over the following days, Rebecca, then a 20-year-old British midwifery student, was interviewed by local police detectives. She handed over her phone and laptop as evidence. She was given a crime reference number and appointed an independent sexual violence adviser (ISVA) to help with the legal process she assumed would take place under the normal rules for prosecutions in England and Wales.
Yet normal rules do not always apply to men like Tyrion Davis, who was then a 22-year-old senior airman in the US air force based at RAF Lakenheath, an American military base. Rebecca alleged that he raped her in June 2020, while he was off-duty and at his home in Brandon, a small market town in rural Suffolk.
Twenty days after Suffolk police commenced their investigation, the force decided to cede control of the case to the US air force. That decision meant Davis would avoid the British justice system, and a possible trial before a jury in a British crown court. Instead, he was prosecuted in a military trial, or court martial, at RAF Lakenheath.
View image in fullscreen Davis at work at RAF Lakenheath in July 2021. Photograph: Operation 2021/Alamy By the time of the trial, in June 2022, the case against Davis had expanded to include similar sexual assault allegations from a second woman: his estranged wife, Emily. Davis insisted his sexual encounters with Rebecca and Emily, both British women, had been consensual.
However, he was convicted of sexually assaulting Emily, whose name has also been changed to protect her identity, “by penetrating her vulva with his penis, without her consent”.
It is unclear why the offence, which involved non-consensual penetrative sex, was prosecuted by the military as sexual assault. In the criminal justice system for England and Wales, such an offence is likely to have been charged as rape.
Davis was acquitted of 10 further counts of sexual assault and abusive sexual contact, and two counts of assault, against Rebecca and Emily.
In interviews with the Guardian, Rebecca and Emily spoke of their horrific allegations against the US airman, and their traumatic experience of giving evidence against him at the court martial.
Rebecca, who now works for the…