A GIRL woke up during a sleepover to find a family friend groping her chest, Swindon Crown Court heard.

Now 18, the girl alleged she had woken up in John Dunne’s bed to find the bald motorcyclist with his hand up her pyjama top.

When the girl, who said she believed she was nine or 10 at the time, asked what Dunne was doing he claimed he had been “looking for her bellybutton”.

Giving evidence before a Swindon jury yesterday, she said fear had left her frozen.

“I was scared, I froze and I went back to sleep,” jurors heard. She could not remember if she had woken up in his bed.

It wasn’t until 2017 that she went to the police, after reporting the alleged abuse first to her boyfriend then her mother.

The alleged abuse by Dunne, who was a family friend and a man she described as being like an uncle, had left her distrustful of older men and suffering anxiety during her teenage years. She had undergone counselling.

Opening the Crown’s case, prosecutor Rob Welling claimed Dunne had plied her with booze while two other girls on the sleepover had slept in another room.

“He gave her some beer and between sips of beer he began to kiss her on the lips. Each time the kisses became longer and that frightened her,” he said.

“We suggest giving her beer was a way of disinhibiting her and also by drawing her into this, by making her compliant.

“She told the police afterwards she felt she’d be in trouble and it was for that reason she felt she couldn’t tell her parents.”

It was said the girl had gone to sleep in the same bed as two other girls on the sleepover but had woken up in Dunne’s bed. He was moving his hand over her chest.

David Maunder, defending, questioned the veracity of the claims.

He asked: “Are you quite certain this is not a false memory, perhaps a vivid dream, or perhaps a memory that has become mixed up over a passage of time.”

The girl stuck to her story, replying: “It’s not a dream.”

The barrister said: “I have to suggest on behalf of Mr Dunne nothing happened on that night. It was to all intents and purposes a fairly standard sleepover.”

Dunne, 54, now of Westwood Road, Southampton, denies sexual assault on a girl under 13.

The trial continues.