A JEALOUS Rugby man has been warned he has got to respect his former partner’s ‘entitlement to be free’ after breaking into her home and assaulting her.
Despite having a new girlfriend of his own, Rian Wrighton had wrongly believed his ex had another man at her home and kept demanding ‘Where is he?’ a judge has heard.
The 24 year-old of Newbold Road, was jailed for eight months after pleading guilty at Warwick Crown Court to affray, two charges of causing damage, and two of assault.
Prosecutor Scott Coughtrie said by November last year Wrighton and Holly Jelley had been together for five years, and had an 18-month-old child, but for the last two years it had been an on-off relationship.
On November 8 he had been trying to contact her, but her phone had not been working.
At 7am the following morning Miss Jelley heard shouting and knocking at the front door of her home in Arnold Street, and Wrighton then went round the back and smashed a window before climbing through.
Mr Coughtrie said there was then a knock on the front door from a friend of Wrighton’s, but as Miss Jelley opened it Wrighton took hold of her by the neck and pushed her to the floor.
She got up and, in pyjamas and bare feet, ran out of the house towards Railway Terrace, but he went after her and punched her up to five times to the stomach before running off with his friend.
Then in March this year, while Wrighton was on bail over that incident, Miss Jelley was in the bathroom when she heard the front door open.
She assumed it was her mother, who had been due to visit, but then saw it was Wrighton who threatened her and pulled a hammer out of a rucksack and demanded to see her phone to check the photographs on it, jealously believing there was other men in her life – although there were not.
Mr Coughtrie added Wrighton, who had no previous convictions, also damaged her new TV during that incident.
Simon Hunka, defending, said: “There was nothing in his life to suggest he would behave in this way. He’d never been in trouble before and he had a job.
“They are no longer together, and he is in a new relationship.”
Jailing Wrighton, who has already served most of his sentence on remand, Judge Richard Griffith-Jones told him: “You have never been in trouble before, but there is within you a fault in your thinking, a misplaced sense of being able to control the life an ex-partner has.
“You have got to learn to respect the mother of your child and to respect the fact that she’s free to behave in any way she chooses to.”
