Man hid phone in work toilet cubicle to make porn film

A maintenance man who hid his phone to film women using the toilet was caught when someone called him, a court heard.

Jason Prowse, 38, allegedly propped his mobile up on pipework under a bench in a cubicle at the Knightsbridge office block where he worked.

A horrified woman says she heard the ringer go off and got down all-fours to see her own face plastered across the phone’s screen as it faced where she had just been sitting.

After hitting the rewind button, she was able to see Mr Prowse placing the camera, jurors heard.

‘The video showed the phone going down, being placed where it was and a gentleman getting up off all fours, walking across and sitting on the toilet,’ she told  Southwark Crown Court.

‘He wasn’t using it. He was sitting on a closed toilet and his trousers were up.’

Prosecutor Gary Venturi added that Mr Prowse could be seen ‘tilting’ to one side in an effort to ‘see what was being recorded by the camera’.

The woman, by now ‘very irate and upset’, says she went straight to the front desk to show the manager and receptionist what she had found when Mr Prowse passed by and said: ‘Oh, that’s my phone.’

She claims he tried to snatch it from her hand but she stopped him and said: ‘Can you please explain to me, if this is your phone, why was I staring at myself going to the restroom?’

‘He got flustered and said it fell out of his pocket,’ she told the court.

She told jurors she ‘immediately knew he was lying’ after spotting no gaps in the bench for the device to drop through.

When his manager confronted him shortly after, Mr Prowse allegedly said: ‘I didn’t do it. I’m not a perv.’

The manager told the court she was ‘so shocked and so upset by what had happened’ that she rubbed out the apparent evidence by deleting the video to ‘spare the blushes’ of the half a dozen women captured.

‘I think I am going to regret deleting that video and giving back that phone for a very long time,’ she said.

She then banished Prowse from the building and he was arrested at his Sutton home days later. Prowse denies a single charge of voyeurism.

Mr Venturi told the court Mr Prowse was working as a maintenance man at the serviced office block on 19 April last year.

Mr Prowse told his manager ‘I’m not a perv’ and denies one charge of voyeurism 

Some time around lunch, a female client went to use the bathroom, which also included a shower room and a small bench to get changed on.

While using the facilities, she became aware of a vibrating sound she recognised as a phone ringing, the court heard.

‘She was able to locate it and it was underneath a small bench in that changing area, propped up against a radiator looking out across the room towards the toilet where she had been sitting,’ said the prosecutor.

‘She picked up the phone and realised she could see herself and a red button showing she was being recorded on that phone.’

When his manager confronted him a short while later, the prosecutor said Mr Prowse told her ‘I’m in so much trouble’ and ‘appeared to be shaking’.

The client then reviewed the footage with the manager and receptionist as Mr Prowse waited in a nearby office.

‘The start of the video showed a picture of someone they certainly recognised as Mr Prowse seemingly to walk away from the phone where it had been positioned, looking as if there was a tilt or some kind of leaning from his sitting position on the toilet before getting up and walking out of the room,’ said Mr Venturi.

‘The video in total lasted about 49 minutes.’

Mr Prowse later claimed to have been using the phone’s torch function as he tinkered with the heating element underneath the bench and had ‘forgotten about it’.

‘It must have been somehow inadvertently that the phone torch came off and happened to be recording with its camera pointed towards the lavatory,’ Mr Venturi said of Mr Prowse’s account.

Mr Prowse, of Conrad Drive, Worcester Park, south-west London, denies a single count of voyeurism. The trial continues.