A LEARNER driver collapsed with shock after her driving instructor had removed a 12-inch carrot from his trousers.

The woman said that she was parked up after performing a maneouvre on the Grove Hill estate of Middlesbrough when bespectacled Stephen Cooney grabbed her hand and stuck it on his groin.

She told a jury about the incident in April 2003: "He said 'You've got me so excited', and I thought it was an erection.

"He said it was because my driving was so good."

She told a jury trying Cooney,51, for sex assaults on three women pupils: "I was shocked, disgusted.

"I thought I had got hold of an erection. Then he pulled the carrot out from down his flies where it must have been throughout my lesson.

"I started to cry. When I got home I collapsed on the pavement. My legs went from under me."

Her next door neighbour told Teesside Crown Court: "She came into my house in a really distressed state, crying.

"She had been telling me for weeks about the remarks that the driving instructor had made, the suggestive comments."

A single mother who had over 20 lessons from Cooney said that when they were parked on the seafront at Whitby, North Yorkshire, he offered to cancel her bill if she had sex with him in a layby, but she refused.

The woman said that he touched her breasts during every lesson, adding:"He didn't just brush past my breast he actually grabbed it and wobbled it.

"One time he showed me two photographs of him naked. He just produced them and I didn't get the chance to look away."

She said that the photographs were different to nude shots of Cooney which police found in the glovebox of his Steve Cooney Motoring school car.

Christine Egerton, defending, said that the woman complained to the police two months after Cooney won a Small Claims Court order against her for £145 for unpaid driving lessons and bailiff's fees.

Cooney of Ronaldshay Terrace, Marske-by-the-Sea, Cleveland, denies two indecent assaults and three sexual assaults.

The case continues.