An actor who stood in as a body double for Brad Pitt has been jailed for 16 years for a campaign of sexual and physical abuse against women.
Luke Ford, who is the first to be prosecuted in Scotland for “stealthing”, was found guilty of charges of abusing nine female victims, including raping six of them and the attempted rape of another, at the High Court in Edinburgh.
The court was told that one of the attacks included stealthing, which is defined as the intentional removing of a condom during sexual intercourse without the consent of the sexual partner. The physical, mental and sexual abuse took place over a 12-year period, from 2008 to 2020.
Since Monday, lawyers acting for Ford and the Crown had been addressing the judge, Lord Summers, over whether Ford should receive an order for lifelong restriction (OLR). Such an order is an effective life sentence — those who receive it are only released from custody once the parole board considers them to no longer pose a threat to public safety.
The judge heard evidence from two consultant forensic psychologists, Marc Kozlowski and Peter Pratt, about the risk Ford posed to women.
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Summers heard on Monday how Ford was “quite distressed” at the prospect of receiving an OLR and was worried that he would die in prison.
Ford, from Stirling, was a jobbing actor and model, and featured as a stand-in for Brad Pitt on the movie World War Z, which was shot in Glasgow in 2013. He also appeared in the video for Deacon Blue’s This Is A Love Song.
On Wednesday, the judge told Ford, 35, that he was persuaded not to pass an order for lifelong restriction and that instead he would be supervised for five years after his release.
Passing sentence, he said his main reasons for this decision were that Ford had no prior convictions, he had shown willingness to accept that what he had done was wrong and that he had voluntarily undertaken a course in prison.
The judge said these programmes showed that Ford’s initial resistance to change had been “overtaken by a more enlightened attitude to your criminal behaviour”.
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Summers said: “Finally, I consider that I should be cautious to pronounce an OLR when, as here, the offending began in your teens and you remain a relatively young man. In that circumstance there is reason to think that you may be amenable to change.”
However, he added: “I am persuaded however on the strength of the evidence of Mr Kozlowski and Dr Pratt that there is a likelihood that on release you will seriously endanger the public and specifically women and that the risk you will pose is best managed by an extended sentence.”
At previous proceedings, the court was told how Ford preyed on women on dating apps, first showering them with affection before financially exploiting, controlling and abusing them.
In the “stealthing” case he met a female psychologist on the dating app Tinder in 2017 and after a few dates they discussed having sex. She messaged Ford stipulating that he use protection because she did not want to risk pregnancy. The court heard that he replied: “Good idea.”
When they were in bed, she handed him a condom but he later told her that he had not used it.
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She told the court: “I was shocked and upset. I would not have had sex with him without a condom. I asked him to leave. I felt completely violated.”
When she confronted him the next day with concern that she could be pregnant, he angrily dismissed her as “paranoid”, saying that it was “no big deal” and to take the morning-after pill.
He texted: “Just get the pill and if you are pregnant get rid of it.”
One of Ford’s victims, who spoke to STV News on the condition of anonymity, said: “I honestly believe that he’s a serial perpetrator and a master manipulator and there’s many more victims out there.
“He genuinely thought he was going to be the next Brad Pitt. I think there were multiple stunt doubles but the way that he spun it, it looked like he was Brad Pitt’s one-and-only stunt double.”
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She added: “I would say it’s taken me a long time to get over what happened and say that life is good now.”
