A Birmingham hypnotherapist molested an 11-year-old girl in his candle-lit treatment room after telling her it would help her to "move forward" with her life, a court has been told.
Peter Knight, 75, is charged with committing a string of sexual offences against women and girls over a ten-year period from the late 1980s to the late 1990s.
Knight, of Selsey Road, Edgbaston, denies the charges against him.
At the time of the alleged offences he ran a company called The College of Universal Development from two Victorian terraced properties in Birmingham, offering hypnotherapy services and tarot card reading, billing himself as a spiritual healer who specialised in positive thinking.
At Birmingham Crown Court, a 22-year-old woman told jurors how he made her lie naked on his desk as he ran his hands "absolutely everywhere", when she was 11 years old.
She had visited him at his Edgbaston base for "around 15" weekly hypnotherapy sessions before he suggested it was time to move on a stage and receive a massage from him, she claims.
She said Knight, who had also provided hypnotherapy sessions for her mother, said she had an "old soul" and needed to unburden herself and "trust him more".
Speaking of the massage, the woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, said: "It was a cold dark Autumn night and I was alone in a house with someone I had never been alone with before.
"As soon as we were alone there was very much a down to business type of feel about everything. He said' 'get undressed' and I remember feeling very uncertain about this. I was horrified at the thought, I was a very modest child.
"He just said take everything off and just come in, which I did", she said, adding that relaxation music was playing in the background and Knight had lit candles around the room.
She said: "He had laid a towel on the desk and he told me to get on the desk for the massage. I was face down on the desk, lying flat out. I was just lay completely naked on the desk."
She said the massage lasted 40 minutes, "20 minutes on each side", adding that at no point was she under hypnosis.
After the massage Knight instructed her to sit naked with her legs apart on a reclining chair for a 20-minute hypnotherapy session, before demanding that she straddle and kiss him, the woman said.
Knight expressed "a great deal of pleasure" when the session drew to a close, and asked her to kiss him she said, adding: "He told me to come over and kiss him like the woman I now was.
"I was instructed to basically get on top of him where he was sat in the chair, my legs either side. He held me underneath my bum with my legs straddling him and he told me to put my arms around his neck and he French-kissed me.
"I didn't know what to make of it...I had nothing to compare it to. What I do know is that inside I felt terrible and absolutely cried my eyes out as I lay in bed that night.
"It made me feel the most uncomfortable and the most mortified I have ever felt to date. I was utterly confused, utterly out of my depth and utterly unable to understand what was going on around me and it has tormented me ever since."
Breaking down in tears, she added: "I was rigid with fear, rigid with embarrassment. I just trusted him, just listened to what he said and just thought, OK, get through this.
"I was working with the mentality that I just had to get on with it and get through it and then I could go home."
The woman, who told her mother about the alleged incident at the time, reported Knight to the police in January last year, sparking an investigation which led a number of other women to come forward with similar claims.
When confronted by David Mason, defending, with the suggestion that her allegations had been fabricated, she replied: "I have told you nothing but fact, free of embellishment and anything else."
Knight is charged with 17 counts of indecent assault, three counts of indecency with a child and two counts of procuring a woman to have sex with him under false pretences, contrary to section 3(1) of the Sexual Offences Act 1956.
The case was adjourned to Wednesday.
