FALSE RAPE CRY MOTHER JAILED

Michaela Lodge’s behaviour was “calculated” and had done a great disservice to genuine rape victims, a court heard.

Lodge, 45, confessed to lying in a letter to her husband Martin three months after he had been arrested and questioned.

Police spent 62 hours investigating her claim that he had raped her in the house they continued to share when in fact she had instigated sex, Chelmsford Crown Court was told.

Yesterday, after Lodge, of Braintree, Essex, admitted perverting the course of justice, Judge Rodger Hayward Smith told her: “Every false allegation of rape increases the plight of women who have been genuine victims of rape in that it makes a genuine allegation harder to prove.”

The court heard Lodge made the rape claim last November. But three months later, in a letter delivered to Mr Lodge by her son Daniel she said: “I am so sorry...when we went to bed we both wanted to make love and the fact is I lied to police about you raping me.”

Marc Brown, defending, said: “It was born more out of a confused desire to remove him from the picture.”