Texas woman who raped 13-year-old boy and forced him to be her 'boyfriend' sentenced to 10 years in prison
WICHITA FALLS, TEXAS: A Texas woman, who raped a 13-year-old boy and made him her "boyfriend", was sentenced to jail after it was determined that she had violated the terms of her probation.
Courtney Lee, 24, first came to the attention of the authorities after she and the victim called the police to report an unspecified incident in August 2015. When officers arrived at their Avenue J residence, they became suspicious of her relationship with the teen. On questioning, the teen told officers that he was Lee's boyfriend. When confronted by the statement, the 24-year-old confessed that she was having sex with the teen and that she was aware he was underage. Lee was arrested and given a competency exam which ultimately ruled she was competent. Lee was sentenced to 10 years' probation for aggravated sexual assault of a child in 2016 after she told the 89th District Judge, Charles Barnard, that she didn’t understand all aspects of the proceedings and that she suffers from schizophrenia and is bipolar.
Lee was arrested the next year when police checked her listed residency, a home on 9th Street, and found that she no longer lived there. Her roommate, George Sapp, told officials she had moved to Ardmore. Texomas Home Page reported that Sapp himself had been involved in a case of child endangerment around the same time after he and his wife were accused of failing to prevent another woman from having sex with their young daughter. Both were convicted of child endangerment.
Lee, who has remained in jail following that 2017 arrest, was sentenced to 10 years in prison earlier this week after her probation for aggravated sexual assault of a child was revoked. She also received another five years in prison for failure to register as a sex offender. A judge ordered the 24-year-old to serve both sentences concurrently and gave her credit for the 1,250 days she had already served behind bars. Lee's initial deferred sentence, perceived by some to have been light, was similar to the 30 months a nursery worker had received across the Atlantic in the UK for having sex with a teenager and then having his baby.
Leah Cordice was reportedly inebriated when, one evening in January 2017, she went into the victim's room where he was playing Xbox and seduced him by pulling his pants down and begging for sex. Cordice had denied all the allegations of sexual abuse and instead claimed that she had been raped by the boy. In a victim impact statement, the boy said that he had been diagnosed with separation anxiety after his child was taken away by social services and that the abuse had changed him. A jury at the Reading Crown Court eventually rejected Cordice's version of events and convicted her of sleeping with the victim at least five times.
"Cordice asserted that the truth was that she had been raped by the victim on multiple occasions... It has understandably been urged on the court that psychiatric examination has found Cordice to be of borderline intellectual ability with an IQ of 70 to 85," Judge Peter Clarke, QC, said at the time. "I had and have difficulty with that assessment... I heard no indication from either Cordice or the victim that she held him in any particular affection, the evidence from at least one witness was of physical obsession and self-indulgence as opposed to emotional attachment."