Lost at Sea (29 page)

Deniz laughs.

“Well, you can laugh occasionally,” he says.

He continues to read. “‘He then leaned over to where I was sat. To my horror he started pulling at my trousers. He wrenched my trousers open and he just went for it.’”

Deniz reads the statement with mock, burlesque horror.

“‘He had his face in my lap and he was performing oral sex on me by putting his mouth around my penis. I was so shocked.’”

Deniz looks up. “He doesn’t say if he had an erection!” he laughs.

“‘After a while he stopped performing oral sex on me, and although my penis was erect I did not ejaculate. I then noticed that King had his trousers undone with his penis exposed and he started masturbating himself. I remember looking out of the window and contemplating walking home. I did not because I just hoped that once he was done he would drop me home. King eventually came and he then drove me home. I didn’t want Jonathan to tell Deniz what had happened, because I thought he’d want to do the same thing.’”

“No thanks, mate,” says Deniz, before carrying on with the statement.

“‘I felt sick and ashamed about what he had done to me, and I remember looking in the mirror the next day and wondering if you could see what had happened in my face. The second assault on me by King took place near the car park which had been previously described. This time he buggered me. . . . Once at the location, we got out of the car and he then led me about fifteen yards to a dip in a wooded area. King led me by placing one hand on the back of my neck and the other on my arm. King was shaking. King then took my trousers and underwear down. He then forced his penis inside my anus and penetrated me. I would describe King as frantic at the time. He was totally uncaring. I honestly believe if I had said no, he would have forced me. King had his underwear and trousers down by his ankles and he used no lubrication. I can also say that he did not have a huge penis.’”

Deniz laughs. “I’m glad to hear that, mate!” he says.

“‘Although he was rough, it was not painful. I was in a state of shock. King eventually came inside of me and it was all very quick. Not only did I wash that night, but I constantly washed myself that week. I hated what he had done to me and I felt dirty. It may be that King grabbed some of my hair, because for about a week I washed my hair every day, which was most unlike me. I even remember my dad making some comment about me using so much shampoo. The third time King assaulted me was . . .’”

Deniz looks up angrily. “How many times do you have to go back before you decide that you don’t like being fucked? Does it take three sexual experiences for you to realize it was bothering you? ‘The third time King assaulted me was, again, following a lift home from the Hop. This time it did hurt and I told him that, but he did not stop. I even asked him if he used Vaseline, and he replied, “Oh no, you’ll do with spit.” It all happened very fast, and he was very surgical and physical. I would also like to add that King never kissed me or showed me any affection. Many years later I attended the Brit Awards, and while I was there I saw Jonathan King. On seeing me, he gave me a long stare and then walked away. I believe he is dangerous and I want to stop it happening to other children.’”

Deniz looks up, in fury, from the evidence statement.

“He wasn’t a child!” he says.

“How old was he?” I say.

“Fifteen,” says Deniz.

In the end, Jonathan is acquitted of this particular charge. The victim admits on the witness stand that he was probably sixteen when he knew Jonathan, and the prosecution can’t prove that the sex was nonconsensual. While there is no statute of limitations for underage sex—or for sexual assaults—a sixteen-year-old who has had consensual sex with an adult must, by law, complain within a year of the offense for the adult to be tried. This boy waited twenty-three years, which is why his case is abandoned.

The day after I see Deniz, I receive an e-mail: “Hope you’ll remember Deniz is not quite as worldly wise as others—don’t hurt him. JK.”

I always find it hard to look Jonathan in the eye after hearing some detailed recital of his sexual behavior. But I wonder whether any act of sex, when described with such precision, would sound equally unpleasant. The evidence Deniz read me constitutes probably the most serious charge of all sixteen complaints, and even it is not as black-and-white as one might like. Why, for instance, did the victim return on two occasions?

I would like to ask Jonathan his views on the intricacies of these sexual power plays, but he professes his innocence so adamantly that he won’t be drawn on the subject. I do, however, get to ask another of his victims, Nick McMeier, these questions. One morning in November, I sit in Nick’s flat in Kingston, Surrey, and he shows me some of the presents Jonathan bought him during their time together.

“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?