A former prison officer who allegedly had an intimate relationship with an inmate said she considered alleged phone sex with him to have been “sexual harassment” that she did not get “sexual arousal” from.

Ruth Shmylo, 26, who was a prison officer at HMP Parc in Bridgend, is on trial charged with misconduct in a public office.

She told Cardiff Crown Court that Harri Pullen had “contacted [her] and did that a handful of times”.

“The first time, when I came to be aware that Harri was masturbating when I was on the phone, I asked him to stop. I repeatedly asked him to stop,” she said.

Pullen then said Shmylo was making him out to be “some f****** nonce”, she told the court.

“I perceived to be sexual harassment, he perceives to be phone sex,” she said.

“I cried, I asked him to stop. That’s what I did.”

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Prosecuting, Mr Matthew Cobbe asked: “So it’s not something you took any pleasure out of?”

“Absolutely not,” she replied.

The jury was played audio recordings of phone conversations between Shmylo and Pullen.

The prosecution questioned why Shmylo could be heard laughing during several of the conversations.

Shmylo said she was “filling a gap with laughing”.

“It’s uncomfortable. An uncomfortable laugh,” she added.

“The alternative to a light-hearted conversation is him threatening to kill me.”

The trial heard Shmylo had at one point told Pullen she was moving to Australia.

“I naively thought that he would just leave it there,” she said, but “it didn’t deter him at all”.

Shmylo told the court that Pullen was a “narcistic fantasist”.

“I always said that I didn’t want to give him the wrong impression,” she said.

The court heard Shmylo was “hysterically crying” when she was dismissed from her role.

“I was glad that I wasn’t going to be in the prison anymore because I wasn’t going to be around Harri,” she added.

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The court heard one of the conversations between the defendant and Pullen referred to an alleged “cwtch” (a hug).

“I haven’t cwtched him,” Shmylo said.

She told the court Pullen’s grandmother had died and he “quite literally fell into [her] arms, grief-stricken”.

“His perception of that is that it was a cwtch,” she added.

Shmylo claimed Pullen had made various threats towards her family and friends.

A friend of his sent a message to Shmylo’s friend “threatening to kick her head in”, she said.

“On different occasions he said that he would get someone to run [Shmylo’s two cats] over.”

She later told the court she was “never going to forgive him”.

The trial continues.

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