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A banker has told how he spent more than a year on bail after a woman he met online made a false rape claim against him. Paul Faulkner, from Hertfordshire, is the latest man to complain about the way sex cases are handled by the police following a string of collapsed prosecutions.

He says he was wrongly accused of a number of offences by a woman he met on Match.com, prompting his house to be raided by four police officers. He told The sun online that he then spent 70 weeks on bail, losing his job and considering suicide, before he was finally told he faced no further action in December last year.

He told the website: 'I had given the police all the evidence, I was not guilty and yet I was treated like a violent criminal who had already been convicted. No one was listening.'

The 46-year-old, who once earned £100,000-a-year, said he was sent a series of texts by the woman, demanding money and vowing: 'I will get my revenge.'

He says the issue of long delays in investigations is serious not just for wrongly accused men like himself, but also for potential victims who may have to wait months to get justice.

Hertfordshire Police said a complaint had been made about the case and was being investigated.

Mr Faulkner spoke out as Scotland Yard continued its review of 600 cases of rape and sexual assault which are awaiting trial, with thousands more under review nationally, amid claims evidence is not being properly dealt with. Last week, the Metropolitan Police and prosecutors were forced to apologise for a litany of blunders which led to student Liam Allan being wrongly accused of rape.

Mr Allan, a criminology student at Greenwich University in London, spent two years on bail accused of rape and sexual assault - under messages from the woman emerged at the start of his trial.

Mr Allan's case collapsed last December, sparking a national debate about the failures by the authorities to disclose relevant information to those accused in sex cases.

The messages sent by the woman in that case included one to a friend saying: 'It wasn't against my will or anything.'

Others read: 'Sometimes sex is the number 1 priority, I'm really not joking to be honest,' and, 'You know it's always nice to be sexually assaulted without breaking the law.' <!-- Global site tag (gtag.js) - Google Analytics -->

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