UK Man Receives Life Sentence For Deliberately Infecting Men With HIV

Daryll Rowe (image via Sussex Police)

Daryll Rowe, a 27-year-old man from Brighton, has become the first person in the UK to be convicted of infecting people with the HIV virus on purpose.

From The Guardian:

After being diagnosed in April 2015 in his home city of Edinburgh, Rowe met men through the gay dating app Grindr. He had sex with eight of them in Brighton, in East Sussex, between October that year and February 2016, before fleeing to north-east England, where he targeted two more men.

His six-week trial heard that he refused treatment and ignored advice from doctors. He insisted on having unprotected sex with the men he met, claiming that he was “clean”. When they refused, he tampered with condoms, tricking them into thinking that he was practising safe sex.

Afterwards, Rowe became aggressive, and taunted some of his victims in text messages. He told one: “I have HIV. Lol. Whoops!” He repeatedly lied to authorities and would use aliases with the people he targeted.

Sentencing him on Wednesday, the judge told him: “Many of those men were young men in their 20s at the time they had the misfortune to meet you. Given the facts of this case and your permissive, predatory behaviour, I cannot see when you would no longer be a danger to gay men. In my judgment, the offences, taken together, are so serious that a life sentence is justified.”

One of his victims, whose parents had died of AIDS, said he did everything to avoid being infected. He told the court, “Daryll Rowe decided to take that right away from me. A part of me died that day when I was diagnosed. The old me is no longer. The new me is constantly sad, thinking about how my life changed. I have been devastated by Rowe’s actions, but I want to make sure that this doesn’t happen to anyone else.”