Gary Glitter
Gary Glitter (born Paul Francis Gadd) is a flamboyant English rock and pop singer and songwriter who had a number of song chart successes in the 1970s, including Rock and Roll parts 1 & 2, I Love You Love Me Love, and I'm the Leader of the Gang (I Am). Glitter was a renowned pop star, but he was supposedly hiding a dark and disturbing secret, a love of child pornography and molestation.
Glitter was born May 8, 1944 in Banbury, in the English county of Oxfordshire. He began performing on the British club circuit during his mid-teens in the late 1950s. His first break occurred when Robert Hartford Davis, a film producer looking to hit the music industry, discovered him and financed a recording session for the British Decca label. Glitter released his first single, Alone in the Night under the stage name Paul Raven in January 1960.
He achieved minor success while performing as Paul Raven. By 1970, several singles including Musical Man, Goodbye Seattle, and a version of George Harrison's Beatles song, Here Comes the Sun were selling well. He began performing under the name Gary Glitter in 1971 as the glam rock movement was becoming more popular.
Gary Glitter's name and career exploded when he created a fifteen-minute jam that was cut down to a pair of three-minute extracts, which Glitter and his music producer, Mike Leander, called Rock and Roll, Parts One and Two. Rock and Roll (Part Two) was the more popular cut and went to #2 on the British pop charts and hitting the Top Ten in the United States. Rock and Roll (Part Two) is still popular today and is often played at basketball games to fire up the crowd.
I always thought that Glitter was flaming gay. He wore flamboyant outfits and seemed very effeminate. However, his public persona was nothing more than an act because he's apparently sexually attracted to little kids, not men. In November 1997 Glitter was arrested after child pornography images were discovered on the hard drive of a personal computer he had taken to a PC store for repair. During the course of the repair, a technician accessed Glitter's image files to test the software and discovered the images.
Glitter was convicted of possession of child pornography in 1999 and was formally classified as a sex offender. Glitter served two months of a four-month sentence. He was also charged with having sex with an underage girl, Alison Brown, when she was 14 years old. Glitter was acquitted of this charge after it emerged that Brown had sold her story to News of the World and was going to earn more money from the newspaper on Glitter's conviction.
Glitter reportedly attempted to move to Cuba in 2000 to get away from the media’s intrusion into his perverted lifestyle, but was thwarted after the Cuban Consulate in London was tipped off and his picture and real name sent to all Cuban ports. He also began shaving his head and grew a pointy beard to round out his "dirty old man" image. He subsequently moved to Cambodia. There was a public uproar over his presence in Cambodia, causing Cambodian authorities to expel him in 2002, determining that he was “a threat to the security of a country and to the national image of Cambodia.” Glitter was jailed for three nights in Cambodia on suspicion of sex offences, but was not convicted of any crime.
Glitter later moved to Vietnam. On November 12, 2005, Gary Glitter fled his home in Vietnam, despite having applied for permanent residence in that country. Three days later, he was arrested in Ho Chi Minh City while trying to board a flight to Thailand. Six girls and women in Vietnam, aged 11 to 23, admitted to having sex with Glitter (the age of consent in Vietnam is eighteen).
After his arrest, Glitter was held on suspicion of having sex with two underage girls. Glitter was jailed throughout the criminal probe, which was completed on December 26, 2005. The charge of rape was dropped for, according to Glitter's lawyer, "lack of evidence,” although the singer admitted that an eleven-year-old girl had slept in his bed. If he had been convicted of child rape, he could have been sentenced to the death penalty by firing squad.
Glitter was tried on charges of committing obscene acts with two girls, aged 10 and 11, and could have faced up to fourteen years in prison if convicted. The trial opened on March 2, 2006 and ended the next day, upon which Glitter was found guilty as charged and sentenced to three years' imprisonment.
Glitter is currently in a Vietnamese jail and is probably planning his next lewd act. He has actually tried to justify his actions and has said, "I've done nothing wrong — there's nothing wrong with having a relationship with a 12-year-old girl if it’s consensual." For this and the other reasons discussed above, Gary Glitter is one washed-up (and perverted) celebrity!
