False accuser edited her side of Facebook conversation to frame man for rape, but now he is free

A man who spent more than three years in prison on a rape conviction has been freed after a family member found deleted Facebook messages that proved his innocence.

Danny Kay, 26, of Derby in England, had been jailed in 2013 after a woman accused him of rape following a sexual encounter the year before, according to local media. Key to his conviction were Facebook messages that appeared to show him apologising for sex without the woman’s consent.

It turned out the woman had selectively deleted messages in an apparent effort to prove her version of the story. It was only when Kay’s sister-in-law Sarah Maddison found an archived version of the messages on his Facebook account that he was able to get the conviction overturned.

England’s Court of Appeal in London ruled that police relied on an “edited and misleading” account of the Facebook conversation that was given to them by the complainant in the weeks after she claimed she was raped by Kay, the Daily Mail reported.

Kay told the paper that he owed his liberty to a conversation with a fellow inmate who convinced him the Facebook messages he thought were lost were recoverable.

Kay then asked Maddison to log in to his account. “I couldn’t believe how easy it was to find the messages,” she told the Daily Mail. “I am no social media expert,” she said, but “it only took me a minute to find them, so how trained police couldn’t is beyond me.” Kay had strenuously denied the charges to police.