Kieran Hayler has been acquitted of raping and sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl when he was married to Katie Price.
The 39-year-old was found not guilty of three counts of rape and one count of sexual assault of the teenager in West Sussex in 2016 following a trial at Lewes Crown Court.
He was also cleared of four alternative counts of sexual activity with a child.
His relationship with media personality Price was laid bare during proceedings as he accused his ex-wife of setting him up with ‘fabricated’ allegations.
Hayler accused Price of a ‘smear campaign’, allegations which Price denied.
Price denied being ‘angry and vengeful’ towards her ex-husband.
The jury, made up of four men and six women, returned the verdicts after 14 hours and 55 minutes of deliberation.
Hayler was emotional and bent over as he was told by the judge he could leave the dock and was discharged.
During Price’s testimony this month, she was asked about messages exchanged between her and the complainant.
She said: ‘I can’t remember the exact messages, but it was that Kieran had tried to kiss her, that he had done stuff to her’. When pressed on what was said between them, she added: ‘Definitely a kiss and that he said he loved her’.
The mother-of-five told jurors she ‘wanted to get information out of [the complainant] because it’s serious’, adding that she could ‘tell that [the complainant] was, like, afraid’.
Elsewhere, she said she was ‘shocked’ at the allegations.
Hayler was first interviewed by police in January 2022, at which time he denied that anything sexual happened.
While he and Price split in 2018, their divorce took three years to finalise.
Hayler was the I’m A Celebrity star’s third husband, following her marriages to Peter Andre and Alex Reid.
She and Hayler wed at a luxury Bahamas resort merely five weeks after their first in-person meeting. He would appear in her 2018 fly-on-the-wall series My Crazy Life.
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