Alexander Westwood, a 24-year-old British actor who worked on Netflix’s “Sex Education” in the background cast, has been sentenced to 15 and a half years in jail for 26 offenses including rape and sexual assault, according to the BBC.
Westwood denied each offense when he was found guilty in December. For 11 of the offenses, his sentence was reduced by half because he was a minor when those crimes were committed.
The judge presiding over the case said during the sentencing that Westwood “used his minor celebrity status to prey on impressionable, innocent, young girls,” the BBC reports. Per IMDB, Westwood appeared in 17 episodes of “Sex Education” as an uncredited student and two episodes of the U.K. series “Doctors” in two different uncredited roles.
Westwood’s five victims included a young child, a boy between the ages of nine and 10, two teenage girls and a woman. The prosecutor said that he had normalized sexual abuse for himself as a child, with the earliest offenses beginning when Westwood was 10 years old and the victim was six. Between 2010 and 2018, “the victim was made to watch porn, touched and incited to engage in sexual activity” hundreds of times, per the BBC. Then, when Westwood was 18, he played a “game” with a 10-year-old boy in which he encouraged the boy to touch himself.
The two teenage girls both went to Westwood for acting lessons. The first was abused between November 2020 and September 2021 and was pressured to discuss and act out sexually explicit scenes in addition to being raped and sexually assaulted. The abuse of the second teenager occurred from May to August of 2021; Westwood touched her chest and pubic region while she acted out sexual scenes. Westwood’s adult victim was sexually assaulted between September 2020 and October 2021; she was repeatedly pinned down, eventually biting Westwood in order to escape.
While noting that the “campaign” of Westwood’s crimes had had “devastating consequences for the five victims,” the judge also described Westwood’s demeanor as “seemingly nonchalant” and “arrogant.” The BBC reports that Westwood “smirked” during a reading of his crimes.
