A MAN accused of raping a 13-year-old girl he met on a bus has insisted he told her he wouldn’t do anything she wasn’t comfortable with.

Jonathan Swift, aged 25, of Canon Street, Newport, denies raping the teenager in an alley in the Malpas area of the city on Saturday, March 1, and breaching a sexual offences prevention order.

He was banned from approaching children four years ago, a jury at Cardiff Crown Court was told, but he claimed the girl told him she was 17 as he chatted to her on the back seat of the bus.

“I asked her where she was from and how old she was,” he said yesterday. “I’m on the register and I wanted to make sure. I thought she looked at least 17.”

In his account of their conversation he claimed he complimented her.

“She came a bit nearer and said, ‘You’re fit’. I said, ‘Oh, thank you’.

“I said ‘I can’t be that fit, I couldn’t pull you if I tried.’ She said, ‘try me’.

“I said, ‘Would you get on me if I asked?’ She said yeah.”

Swift told the jury ‘get on’ was slang for kiss.

He claimed that after they got off the bus together they chatted about “things we were going to do to each other. I told her I wouldn’t do anything without her wanting to. She said she just usually goes with the flow.

“She said she would do whatever I wanted to do,” he claimed. “I asked if she wanted sex and she said ‘Yeah, OK’.”

When Janet McDonald, prosecuting, asked if the sex had been “gentle”, Swift said it had, and doubted anything he did would have caused her bruising or scratching.

Ms McDonald, cross-examining, suggested it was odd that the two had not swapped names or phone numbers if it had been a consensual and enjoyable encounter.

A woman who said she was the first person to see the girl after the attack has previously told the court it was clear something was wrong because she was crying, distressed and agitated.

The jury was told Swift was given a sexual prevention order in May 2010 after admitting a sexual assault on a 16-year-old girl after being picked out of an ID parade.

He was banned from approaching, speaking to, or being with any child who were not family members, for 10 years.

They also heard another girl Swift had chatted to on a bus claimed he subsequently sexually assaulted her after getting off at her stop.

The jury can still find Swift guilty of engaging in sexual activity with a child under 16 if they acquit him of rape.

Proceeding.