Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries

by Jon Ronson

  “Whenever I visited, I’d end up with two or three records,” says Nick. “So I guess you can calculate how many times I visited him on that basis.”

  I look at the pile of records. “There must be thirty or forty records here,” I say. “Or more.”

  “And he gave me a copy of his book Bible Two,” says Nick. “And a guitar. And a biography of Edie Sedgwick.”

  Jonathan also took Nick on trips—to the Walton Hop, for instance, and to Deniz’s house, although nothing happened there. He gave him driving lessons in his TR7 in the car park of Chessington World of Adventures. “He enjoyed being assertive. He was never particularly shy about name-dropping or describing just how famous he was.” Nick laughs. “There was one occasion where we were in his Rolls-Royce in London and he pulled out in front of somebody and they beeped him and he turned round and said, ‘Do you mind? There’s a famous person here!’ And we carried on driving. It made me laugh at the time because it was true. He was a famous person.”

  “Do you think that if you’d stopped being starstruck, he would have lost interest in you?” I ask.

  “Yes,” says Nick.

  Nick is thirty-four, and very good-looking. He tells me how they first met. He was between fourteen and sixteen—he can’t exactly remember—and he was cycling home from Richmond Park when Jonathan King pulled over in his Rolls-Royce and asked him directions to the Kingston bypass.

  “I gave him the directions and then he said, ‘Do you know who I am?’ ‘Actually, no.’ He said, ‘You do realize who I am?’ And I said, ‘Yeah. I do.’ I tried to act as un-starstruck as I possibly could.”

  As they stood there on the road, Jonathan asked Nick to phone the BBC and tell them just how much he enjoyed his TV shows and could they please commission more from him. Nick agreed, although he never did phone.

  They swapped phone numbers and Jonathan called several weeks later and invited him to his flat.

  “We listened to some records, had a bit of a chat. He showed off his mirrored toilet. He said, ‘Take a look in there, it’s pretty impressive.’ So I went in there and was duly impressed. And that was pretty much it.”

  This was the only time that no sex took place. On every other occasion, Jonathan buggered Nick. “Why did you keep going back?” I ask.

  “I don’t really know. Well, I was getting records every time. But I was also enjoying the sexual gratification. I wasn’t racked with guilt. At that age, you’ve got the hormones raging around inside you. And I felt taken care of. I knew that wasn’t how grown-ups normally took care of children, but he had a kind of invincibility about him. A self-assurance.”

  Nick’s relationship with Jonathan King lasted eighteen months. In the intervening years, he has come to identify the extent of the emotional scarring those months caused him. He has just completed six weeks of therapy, which, he says, has barely scratched the surface.

  “It caused a division between my emotional side and myself,” he says. “It was like I put my emotions in a room and shut the door. It’s not even something I was aware of happening until I spoke to the police and they came to interview me. And two days later this incredible dark cloud came over me, like a black dog. It also bothers me quite a lot that I was lying to my parents. He even came round one Christmas and met the whole family. We got together a Christmas stocking for him with a pound coin in the bottom of it and a satsuma.”

  Nick says that he has seen the message Jonathan posted on his website, comparing his victims to the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center.

  “I think he’s rather a sad, impotent man,” says Nick, “whose chickens have come home to roost.” He laughs. “But that’s probably a coping mechanism for myself to disenfranchise him of any power.”

  On day five of the trial, one of the victims says in court that Jonathan had a blue door, when in fact his door was white. This presumably trivial inaccuracy gives rise to the following e-mail from Jonathan: “The accusers have provenly lied on oath—blue front door etc. Will the CPS prosecute them for perjury? Rather doubt it. If the verdicts are guilty, they collect their cash from the Compensation Board. . . . Is this right or fair? A topic you may feel inclined to raise in your wonderful story. See you later. JK.”

  Most of the conversations that occur in the Old Bailey canteen among the journalists center not on Jonathan King but on Ron Thwaites, his extraordinary, shocking, charismatic defense barrister.

  “Ron could get the Devil off,” one veteran Old Bailey tabloid reporter tells me.

  Before the trial even started, during the preparatory hearings in July, Thwaites had great success reducing the charges against his client. “Lots of people,” he said to Judge Paget, “don’t enjoy sex.”

  Lots of people don’t enjoy sex—but this doesn’t mean that assaults have been committed against them. Where’s the guilty mind if the boys appeared to acquiesce? An assailant, he argued, must know he’s committing an assault for a crime to have occurred. But there were no protestations. Nowhere in the evidence did a boy admit to saying “No!” or “Stop!” And if they really hated it—if it scarred them—why wait twenty years to come forward! Thirty years!

  David Jeremy, the prosecution barrister, argued that the look on their faces would have suggested protestation.

  Thwaites contended that if King was having anal sex with them, he wouldn’t have seen the look on their faces. Yes, said Thwaites, King approached boys. He approached thousands of boys.

  “These encounters,” he said, “are the tip of the iceberg.”

  But he did not approach them for sex. He approached them for market research. “My client interacts with his public,” he said, “on a grand scale.” I looked over at the arresting officers. They chuckled wryly at the words “tip of the iceberg.”

  Then Thwaites attacked the police, accusing them of underhanded tactics. If a complainant said he was between fourteen and sixteen when the assault allegedly occurred, the police wrote that he was fourteen. He asked for six of the complainants to be struck off the charge sheet, and the judge agreed to four of them. Thwaites also asked for three trials instead of one, for the purposes of “case management.”

  The prosecution, startled by this suggestion, argued that this would harm their best evidence—the pattern of King’s seduction. But Judge Paget agreed to split the trials.

  “Oh, fuck,” whispered an arresting officer, putting his head in his hands, when the judge announced his decision.

  The unspoken assumption, shared by all parties, was that there would never be three trials. The prosecution was likely to throw in the towel after trials one or two, whatever the outcome. So the preparatory hearing turned out to be a great victory for King and Thwaites.

  Every day in the Old Bailey, Ron Thwaites launches another merciless attack on anybody he can think of who is not his client. The victims are “cranks” who “came out of the woodwork” seeking “compensation.” This includes one who cried in the witness box. “Crocodile tears!” he snarls. Others are “drug addicts and fantasists and liars.” One is “completely mad.”

  Admittedly, Thwaites does have something of a point here. One of the victims, Chris Sealey, admits within five minutes of cross-examination that he sees black cats that nobody else can see and thinks that Gypsies are going to come to his house to rip out his throat. Chris also admits that he came forward solely for the money. He hopes to sell his story to a newspaper. (He does: to the Sunday People, embellishing his testimony with extraordinary relish.)

  Chris’s argument is “So what?” Jonathan King got something out of him, so why shouldn’t he get something out of Jonathan King?

  Thwaites even brings me into the mix at one point. During his summing-up he points in my direction and says to the jury, “I cannot prove that there is a contract in which [the complainants] have agreed to appear on TV or in the newspapers. . . .”

  His implication seems to be that the Ronson-Victim financial pact is so cunning that the poor, justice-seeking defense team
cannot break through its steely ramparts. The real reason why Thwaites cannot prove this contract exists is, of course, because it doesn’t (Nick does not want to be paid for our interview), but I cannot let the jury know this. I just have to sit there. From a distance, the game-playing between prosecution and defense in an Old Bailey trial might seem impressively ingenious, but close up I sometimes find it quite horrible.

  But Thwaites does highlight some of the unfortunate aspects of the case. There is no material evidence. No DNA. How can King defend himself against crimes that occurred so long ago?

  “Justice delayed,” says Thwaites, “is justice denied.”

  Nonetheless, for all of Thwaites’s mini-victories, Jonathan tells me he has already packed his bags, all ready for a guilty verdict. He says he has bought every book on the Booker Prize short list in preparation for life in jail.

  It takes the jury three days to reach a verdict. The night before they do, Jonathan sends me an e-mail that reads: “Pray for me.”

  I don’t e-mail him back. I have grown to like Jonathan King, but he is guilty. As likable as he is, he did it. Perhaps there is some homophobia in this case. Bill Wyman, after all, got away with having sex with a younger girl. Is it unfair, as Jonathan claims, that his initial high-profile arrest was simply a way for the police to advertise for more victims to come forward? Most observers agree that the prosecution would never have secured a conviction with the initial complainants’ allegations, and that the police were hoping for more reliable witnesses to come forward. Is it unfair, or clever police work?

  I don’t see Jonathan in the canteen or the lobby on the day of the verdict, but I do see him in the dock as the jury files in. He smiles at me. Every male juror makes a point of looking at Jonathan as they take their seats. The women all look away. The clerk of the court asks the foreman for the verdict on the first count, and he says, “Guilty.”

  Jonathan nods.

  Then it is time for count two—the most serious charge. Buggery. This is the charge that relates to Chris Sealey. The foreman says, “Guilty.”

  Jonathan nods.

  There are six guilty verdicts in total. A clean sweep. Judge Paget says that, under these circumstances, bail must be revoked. Within seconds, Jonathan is led downstairs from the dock and straight to Belmarsh prison.

  • • •

  LITTLE KELLERSTAIN, Tam Paton’s large, outlandish, rural bungalow near Edinburgh Airport, his home for twenty-seven years, give or take his twelve months in jail for child-sex offenses and the years traveling the world in Learjets and limousines with his young charges, the Bay City Rollers, is noisy today. You imagine it to have always been a noisy place. Indeed, the old neighbors, the now-dead rich couple who lived next door at the grand Kellerstain House, used to complain bitterly about their eccentric legendary pop-impresario neighbor, the packs of screaming Roller fans forever camped outside his electric gates, the parties, the teams of police officers searching his house for clues of pedophile activity, and then more screaming—the screams of the headlines: “Sordid Secrets of Twisted Tam,” “Tam’s Night in the Sauna with the Boys.”

  Today, the place is noisy with dogs and boys. The dogs are Rottweilers. There are four of them, and they seem to hate one another. There are about half a dozen boys living with Tam. They live in spare rooms and in trailers in the garden. They are all around eighteen years old. Tam is sixty-three now. He is polite to a fault, almost humble. It is as if the years of being considered a pedophile have reduced him to a position of constant subservience around strangers. The Tam Paton of today is nothing like the fearsome Svengali you would see on television during the Roller years.

  I have come to see Paton because of the similarities in his and Jonathan King’s crimes. They were friends and colleagues, and would visit the Hop together. The boys Paton “indecently assaulted” were not that young like Jonathan. The youngest was fifteen. I know it will take Jonathan years to settle into his new role in life as a convicted celebrity pedophile. Paton has had twenty years to do this. So I imagine that meeting him will be like meeting Jonathan in the future.

  “I was jailed for six years for underage sex,” says Tam. “Underage sex. Under the age of twenty-one. This was 1981. I served a year. My victims were . . . one was fifteen. I never even touched him. There was nothing physical in that particular charge. The chap was deaf and he had a speech impediment. He came to my house and he saw a pornographic movie, a heterosexual pornographic movie.”

  “What was it called?” I ask.

  “Tina with the Big Tits,” says Tam. “This happened right here in this very room. It was all to do with women’s boobs. Big boobs. All sizes of boobs. And he’d had two lagers. The charges that were raised against me was that I’d subjected a fifteen-year-old handicapped boy to pornographic movies and supplied him with stupefying alcohol with intent to pervert and corrupt. I got six months right there for that.”

  Tam takes me to the scene of more of his crimes—his sauna room. It was built in the seventies, in what used to be his utility room. He turns on the Jacuzzi. It bubbles into life. “I got six months for putting my hand on a guy’s leg in the sauna,” says Tam. “And then I got another two years for a chap who willingly came up here. He was sixteen, educated, a nice guy. He came up in a taxi. I gave him a bottle of Lambrusco.”

  Of course, the stigma of being imprisoned for underage-sex crimes remains with Tam. Just last week, one of his friends—who has a three-month-old baby—was visited by social services and warned that the baby should be kept away from Tam.

  “A tiny little baby!” says Tam. “People look at me like I’m an animal. People who don’t know me judge me. I always remember going up to visit someone in prison, and this woman was sitting there. She was looking at me, growling a bit, and I could imagine what she was thinking: ‘There’s a pedophile!’ Anyway, I later discovered about her character. And I’ll tell you, it outweighed anything I’d ever done.”

  “What had she done?” I ask.

  “Shoplifting,” says Tam.

  There is a silence.

  “People have their own little guilt trips,” says Tam. “They look around. ‘Who’s a beast? Who’s a pedo?’ Now it’s on my record for the rest of my life. If I want to go into business, I have to state that I was done for lewd and libidinous. Gross indecency. People think, ‘Oh my God! He must have been crawling about in a nursery.’”

  “Can I ask about the boys who live here?” I say. “What do they do?”

  “They clean up,” he replies, a little sharply. “They feed the dogs. They take them for walks. They help me with my property business. They are eighteen years of age, and I don’t have a relationship with them. You can interview them until the cows come home. Maybe I just like nice people floating about. We don’t have orgies. There’s no swinging from the chandeliers. Even if there was,” he adds, “it would be legal.”

  Tam believes he was targeted because of his fame, because he was a celebrity Svengali. He blames his arrest, then, on the pop business. And now he is out of it. He has become a property millionaire, with forty flats in Edinburgh’s West End.

  “I do get myself upset,” he says. “I’ve given away all the Roller albums to charity. I want to forget it all. I’ve had two heart attacks. And now the same thing is happening with Jonathan. A foxhunt. Everyone wants to see the death of the fox. They would never have gone after us if we were heterosexual. But if you’re a poof, my God.”

  I change the subject.

  “Do you think you have emotionally scarred any of the boys for life?” I ask.

  “Oh my God,” he says. “I hope not.”

  • • •

  IN MID-OCTOBER 2001, I have coffee with Jonathan King’s brothers Andy. He’s just visited Jonathan in Belmarsh for the first time.

  “How is Jonathan doing?” I ask.

  “Great,” says Andy. “He seems really cheerful. Talking ten to a dozen.”

  “Really?” I ask.

  “He’s wearing pi
nk pajamas as a silent protest,” Andy tells me. “He says it’s aesthetically reminiscent of the way gays were treated under the Nazis.”

  On November 20, things take a turn for the better for Jonathan. He is acquitted of buggery and indecent assault in the second trial—the witness admits on the stand that he was sixteen and not fifteen. The Crown Prosecution Service announces that same day that it won’t proceed with any more trials—this includes the allegations from boys who said Jonathan King had picked them up at the Walton Hop.

  The next morning, Jonathan is sentenced to seven years. Judge Paget says that the case is a tragedy. This otherwise honorable man, he says, this successful celebrity, used and abused his fame and success to attract impressionable teenagers. But there was no violence, no threats used.

  Jonathan smiles and nods as he is sentenced. One journalist says that he looks smug; another says that he looks pale and beaten. His name is placed indefinitely on the sex offenders’ list. The police say he may have abused hundreds of boys over the past thirty years.

  POSTSCRIPT

  Jonathan King wrote to me throughout his prison sentence, and sent me Christmas cards, etc. I wasn’t the only one. The Observer’s Lynn Barber published a brilliant article about their pen-pal friendship. Her husband, David Cardiff (who was my teacher at college), was dying, and Jonathan had proved to be a “wonderful confidant,” she wrote. She visited him at Maidstone prison and reported that he was walking around wearing a T-shirt that read “I’m a celebrity—get me out of here!”

  “The very qualities—the relentless cheeriness, bumptiousness and optimism—which made him seem quite irritating on the outside seem absolutely heroic in prison,” she wrote.

  Just before Christmas 2001, a few weeks after the Guardian published my story about the case, I received a telephone call from the former Radio 1 DJ Chris Denning. Back in the seventies, Denning and Jonathan were best friends and business partners. Denning had, days earlier, been released from a three-year jail sentence in Prague for child-sex offenses. The night before his deportation from the Czech Republic, I met him at a down-at-the-heels hotel off Wenceslas Square. He wouldn’t say which country he was going to. (It turned out to be Austria.) He faced a number of similar offenses in Britain, and he told me he’d be arrested if he ever returned here.