Former Leadmill manager denies abusing power to groom young employee, despite £350,000 court ruling

Rupert Dell was ordered to pay more than £350,000 after the owners of the renowned 900-capacity city centre venue won a civil case at Sheffield County Court.

But he denies the court's findings, claiming the case was brought as part of a 'vendetta' against him and he could not afford to contest the claim.

In a ruling made on January 30 this year, a copy of which has just been obtained by The Star, Her Honour Judge Richard found that Mr Dell had breached his contract on numerous counts.

He created the role of box office manager and recruited a young woman with whom he had been flirting online, the judge ruled, 'engineering' her appointment to advance his personal relationship with her.

Between January and February of 2014, he demonstrated an 'inappropriate' level of intimacy with her, the ruling continues, on one occasion kissing her in his car in a manner which left her with sore lips and a red mark on her neck.

At an awards ceremony that February, he suggested to the woman that he wished to attend her hotel room, the judge found, but she asked him not to and ended up staying with a relative that night because she was worried he would try to enter her room against her wishes.

He then persisted in trying to contact the woman, referred to in the court papers as AB, via Facebook after she told him she had 'had enough' and asked to be left alone.

"The defendant cynically and systematically abused his position of authority and power within The Leadmill and within the music industry for the purposes of grooming, controlling and creating a position of power over AB (a young, vulnerable woman) in order to establish and continue a personal relationship with her," the written judgment states.

The ruling goes on to state how Mr Dell 'facilitated a culture of inappropriate banter' among staff between 2011 and 2014, repeatedly calling female colleagues 'stupid lesbians' and making comments about 'cottaging' with a male colleague whom he referred to as 'gay'.

In February 2014, Mr Dell raised a grievance alleging that a colleague's comments on social media referring to his Jewish origins amounted to harassment and bullying, but the court found this complaint had been made 'vexatiously and in bad faith'.

After leaving The Leadmill, the judgment states, he breached his post-termination agreement by using relationships developed while working for the club to book acts including The Pigeon Detectives to play at competing venues.

Mr Dell, who went on to work as head of venue programming and marketing for the music promoter DHP Family, was ordered to pay The Leadmill £134,000 in damages, plus costs of £222,000. That is on top of costs of £17,000 he was told to pay in April 2016.

Mr Dell said: "My family and I have suffered immeasurably from the civil action taken by Phil Mills, the company director, and The Leadmill for the past three years.

"This was a civil action in a civil court brought by Phil Mills and The Leadmill. The Leadmill continued to pursue the matter in the full knowledge it had little prospect of recovering the hundreds of thousands of pounds it had spent pursuing the case against me.