A man gave his partner a black eye after interrupting her bedroom antics with a gigolo dubbed ‘The Knight Rider’.

Darren Chadband, 51, of George Green, was handed a nine month suspended sentence by Recorder John Hardy QC yesterday after he pleaded guilty part-way through his trial to causing actual bodily harm.

Discharging the jury at Oxford Crown Court, Recorder Hardy said: “It was a case that had it gone on would have astonished you – astonished most of you, perhaps not all – with some of the most extraordinary details of human relationships that I have ever come across.”

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Chadband and his partner had arranged for a gigolo, who had co-opted the name of 80s TV super-cop ‘The Knight Rider’, to come to their property in George Green, in expectation of her return to sex work.

Giving evidence to the jury, she said she and The Knight Rider had been in the bedroom. She had wanted to ‘prove’ to Chadband and herself that she could ‘go back to work’.

“I’ve done this job since I was 18. I stopped working for Darren; to be with him,” said the woman, who we are choosing not to name.

The defendant gave a pre-arranged signal to stop, saying her sister was on the phone, then put music on loudly and began slamming doors, the court heard.

The ‘Knight Rider’ left around 10 or 12 minutes later. “I wasn’t letting him do anything. I was just talking, talking, talking the whole time.”

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She claimed that Chadband had subjected her to a horrifying ordeal, including punching her and pulling at her hair.

Medical evidence showed she had suffered a black eye, although there was nothing to indicate she had lost clumps of hair.

Following his guilty plea, the jury was told that Chadband had been in custody since his arrest in the spring. He was regarded as a model prisoner, with a letter from HMP Bullingdon saying he played an invaluable role in supporting vulnerable inmates. He suffered from poor health and was described as a ‘dying man’.

Sentencing him to nine months’ imprisonment suspended for a year and imposing a restraining order, Recorder Hardy told the defendant: “There can be no doubt that the complainant underwent an unpleasant and frightening experience on the weekend when the Knight Rider came to the flat that you shared with her.

“You have chosen, albeit late in the day, to accept that you bear some responsibility for the nature of that unpleasantry.

“However, where at first having read these papers prior to the trial commencing I took the view this was one of the most severe and savage assault occasioning actual bodily harm cases that I have come across, I now know that that is mitigated first of all by your plea, secondly by the amount of time you have spent in prison already in respect of this matter, thirdly by your health and fourthly I place great credit on the report from [the prison] that shows another side of your character.”

Chadband is currently recalled to prison on licence, having received a 14 year prison sentence in 2009 for robbing shops at gunpoint across the Home Counties.

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