A paedophile Metropolitan Police special constable ‘served nothing but evil behind closed doors’, a woman who was just 12 when he groomed her told a court on Friday.
James Bubb, 28, who now identifies as a woman called Gwyn Samuels, groomed the woman online before sexually assaulting her when she was not yet a teenager.
Bubb was found guilty of raping and sexually assaulting a child after a trial last summer.
The defendant was also found guilty of raping a woman he met online while posing as a 16-year-old girl.
In her victim impact statement the woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, said Bubb was a ‘highly manipulative, narcissistic, grandiose and extremely dangerous individual’ who ‘groomed’ her.
As Bubb sat quietly in the dock at Aylesbury Crown Court, the woman spoke in a powerful voice that sometimes broke.
She told Bubb: ‘When the Metropolitan Police service hired you as a special constable, you swore under oath to protect the public and to give everything you had to fulfil your duties in safeguarding the most vulnerable of people.
‘Yet before you headed to the police station and put on your uniform, you would make sure to get your fill of perversion, attempts at power, sickness and relentless abuse.
‘I remember you telling me that you had to make a mental separation between who you were at home and who you were when you put on your uniform. I thought you were honourable for this.
‘I now realise what you were trying to tell me. The same man that served the public, served nothing but evil behind closed doors.’
The offences took place between 1 January 2018 and 2 April 2024, during which time Bubb was a member of support staff at the prestigious Harrow School, whose alumni include Sir Winston Churchill and six other British Prime Ministers.
Bubb began to volunteer with the Met Police Central West team as a special constable in September 2020 and the force said he was suspended immediately after his arrest by Thames Valley Police (TVP) on 30 April 2024.
He was dismissed without notice on September 26 last year following his conviction and placed on the College of Policing barred list.
The court heard Bubb enountered his first victim on the chat roulette site Omegle in 2018 before meeting in person at a Christian festival a few months later.
The volunteer officer sexually assaulted the girl in public shortly before her 13th birthday and was forced to pull his trousers up after a dog walker went past him.
Jurors were told Bubb was violent towards the girl when he raped and sexually abused her in her early teens, with the victim telling police he choked and punched her.
The girl said the defendant looked ‘paranoid’ when he was with her, and she was being ‘hidden’ when they were in public together.
She told the court on Friday: ‘I vividly remember being 12, already traumatised, already feeling that there was no real way out.
‘No child should ever be made to feel that way, let alone by a police officer, an adult, a trusted person.’
She added: ‘I would not have complex PTSD if James had chosen to be anything but a prolific abuser.’
The woman said the defendant would ‘frequently bring up’ his role as a police officer as a way to control her and ‘why he had the right to induce fear over me and to overstep my boundaries’.
The woman, who is now 20, said ‘I can barely trust anybody any more’ but ‘I am determined to keep fighting and feel I have support now’.
She suffers from complex PTSD and has been unable to work, and went to college but was not able to concentrate.
Even after Samuels was arrested, the woman described herself as feeling ‘trauma-bonded to James’.
She said she had slept in one of his blue hooded tops for two weeks after his arrest.
The court also heard Bubb raped his second victim, a woman he met when she had just turned 18, between January 2018 and February 2023.
The victim said Bubb would ‘use police training techniques’ on her, telling police: ‘The control, the power he got. It sure as hell wasn’t consensual.’
Speaking from behind a curtain, the second victim told the court that Samuels took advantage of a ‘vulnerable 18 year-old’.
She became pregnant but lost the baby, telling the court: ‘I was glad that I miscarried so that this monster would not have any power over me or my child.’
Samuels told her that she was ‘unlovable and no-one would want me’, the woman recalled.
She added there were times when she tried to leave but the defendant would take the key away or drag her back if she wanted to go out, leaving her feeling in the end that it was better to stay.
Samuels also threatened her with 999 calls and being sectioned, the woman said.
Jurors reached verdicts in August last year after deliberating for six hours and 32 minutes.
TVP Detective Sergeant Catriona Cameron said the 27-year-old’s actions were ‘absolutely’ a breach of trust, and suggested Bubb may have more victims.
She said: ‘The investigation we led hasn’t identified the defendant used his position to identify and meet victims, but there was an element that he used the fact that they are a special constable in order to intimidate and they have used officer safety techniques and restraint on the victims as part of their offending.’
Asked how much of a breach of trust Bubb’s actions were, Ms Cameron said: ‘Absolutely, I mean, anybody as a police officer, in that position of trust, we get taught these things and we should only be using them as appropriate.’
Ms Cameron said Bubb ‘identified a vulnerable child to start off with, groomed them’.
She said: ‘They then used fear, intimidation, violence and weapons to abuse the child going forward over a number of years, so very dangerous and very predatory in his offending.’
She said that while safeguarding measures on some online platforms had improved and new legislation had enhanced the protection of children, areas of vulnerability ‘absolutely’ remained.
Bubb, of High Street, Chesham, Buckinghamshire, previously worked as a technician on productions at Harrow School, although police said there was nothing to suggest he offended there.
In a statement, Harrow School said: ‘We are aware that a former member of the School’s support staff was convicted of sexual offences in August last year. Our thoughts are with the victims and their families at this time.
‘The safety and wellbeing of our pupils is always our highest priority. Mr Bubb, now known as Gwyn Samuels, was employed as a member of the School’s support staff between 2018 and April 2024.
‘As soon as we were alerted by the authorities that this employee was subject to an investigation and had not disclosed his arrest to us, we terminated his contract.
‘Having made the appropriate internal enquiries and communicating fully with the police and the Local Authority Designated Officer, we have no reason to believe that they engaged in any misconduct towards pupils or colleagues at the School.’
After the verdict, a spokesperson for the NSPCC child protection charity said: ‘As a special constable, Bubb should have been someone who could be relied on to keep children safe.
‘It is now vital that both the victims in this disturbing case receive all the support they need to move forwards with their lives.
‘Bubb’s actions also highlight once again how tech companies need to be doing much more to make their platforms safe spaces for children and young people when they go online.’
The defendant is due to be sentenced at the same court next Friday.
