A court in Saint Petersburg has sentenced a 41-year-old local woman to four years and one month in prison after convicting her of sexually assaulting a 21-year-old man and attempting to extort money from him.
Darya Lebedeva, the head of the joint press service of the city courts of Saint Petersburg, confirmed the judicial ruling to Russian news outlet Lenta.ru. The defendant, identified in court records under the pseudonym Masha, will serve her sentence in a general regime penal colony.
The court established that the incident occurred after the woman decided to initiate oral physical relations with the victim, who was identified in judicial records under the pseudonym Sasha. When the 21-year-old man refused her advances, the woman physically beat him.
Assault and extortion details
According to court findings, while the victim was suffering from pain caused by the physical beating, the woman undressed, grabbed his head, and forced him into intimate physical contact between her legs. She recorded the intimate encounter using her mobile phone camera.
Following the assault, the defendant demanded 150,000 rubles from the victim. She threatened to distribute the recorded video footage publicly if he did not hand over the requested money.
Conflicting statements in court
During the court hearing, the victim testified that he had not desired any intimate relationship with the defendant. He told the judge that the existence of the video shamed him deeply as a religious person.
The defendant contested the allegations during the trial. She insisted that she had been dating the victim for a month prior to the incident and claimed that the man had voluntarily proposed physical intimacy to her on that day.
Judicial verdict and legal context
The court ultimately found the victim's testimony credible, rejected the woman's defense, and convicted her of both sexual violence and extortion. The judge sentenced her to four years and one month of imprisonment in a general regime penal colony.
Saint Petersburg is Russia's second-largest city, located in the northwestern region of the country, where local judicial proceedings are managed through a centralized court press service. General regime penal colonies in Russia are state corrective institutions where inmates convicted of serious criminal offenses reside in communal dormitories under standard security supervision.
