Conviction Spiritual healing, divination, and mediumship Hypnosis, trance, and altered-state practice Bradford, West Yorkshire, England, UK · 2022

UK: hypnotherapist Ian Roper convicted after commanding a client under trance to undress

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Record class

Core record

Evidence status

Convicted

Authority role

registered hypnotherapist conducting a paid one-on-one hypnosis session with a client

Organization

No organization assigned

Archive classification

This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.

A client under Roper's induced hypnotic trance, during a paid therapeutic session, was told she was somewhere else entirely and acted on his spoken suggestions while unable to test them against her own judgment — the trance state itself was the instrument that made refusal impossible.

Spiritual healing or treatment

Evidence structure

Proceedings

2022-09-30 · guilty plea and sentence

Bradford Crown Court, England. Ian Roper, 58, pleaded guilty to causing a person to engage in sexual activity without consent and to possession of five indecent images of children. Recorder David Gordon sentenced him to 29 months' imprisonment (25 months for the sexual offence, 4 months consecutive for the images), imposed a 10-year Sexual Harm Prevention Order banning him from working as a hypnotist or hypnotherapist, made him sign the sex offenders' register for 10 years, and imposed a restraining order against contacting the victim.

Documented coercion mechanisms

induced hypnotic trance used to convince the client she was on a hot sun bed and needed to apply imaginary sun cream to her body
the client's second-ever session with him, before she had any basis to doubt his instructions while under trance
the therapeutic setting itself, which gave his spoken suggestions the appearance of legitimate treatment

Cited record

Sources

high quality reporting disposition Nadia Lincoln, "Yorkshire hypnotist sexually abused client after 'telling her she was on a sun bed'", YorkshireLive/ExaminerLive, 1 October 2022.: Contemporaneous report of the sentencing, guilty plea, and trance mechanism used against the victim.
high quality reporting disposition "Hypnotherapist who made woman engage in sexual act while under his control is jailed", PA Media via Yahoo News UK, 1 October 2022.: Confirms sentence breakdown, Sexual Harm Prevention Order terms, and the ban on working as a hypnotherapist.

Source provenance

Source access and integrity log

This log records source retrieval and file integrity. It does not mean that an automated process independently confirmed every statement in the source.

Source and tier basis: https://www.examinerlive.co.uk/news/west-yorkshire-news/yorkshire-hypnotist-sexually-abused-client-25151284 Corpus classification: high-quality-reporting; evidentiary role: disposition. SHA-256 03a846c44165395443e8a6713af11db973c5e1496596d7818121ed5e4549787e
Retrieval: 2026-07-20 · Preserved; Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger
Source and tier basis: https://uk.news.yahoo.com/ian-roper-hypnotherapist-jailed-145356627.html Corpus classification: high-quality-reporting; evidentiary role: disposition. SHA-256 0866d02f455b88b3e24f6369f8675c8f38c7639276690f6a907ae9232574662d
Retrieval: 2026-07-20 · Preserved; Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger

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