In the end it is a short interview, just half an hour. What was I thinking? That she would admit to being a fraud? I will give her this, though: I believe that she is genuinely passionate and knowledgeable about spiritual things. The only times during the interview when she becomes really animated are when she talks about Mother Goddess this and that. So I don’t believe that part is fake. But there is no doubt that she makes a fortune saying very serious, cruel, showstopping things to people in distress, especially, it seems, when she’s in a grumpy mood.
“I don’t think people should go to a psychic to hear a fairy story,” she says. “It might be nice for a time, but what about the validity in the future?”
“But when you’re dealing with missing kids and you’re wrong,” I say, “it’s very, very bad.”
“Right.” She shrugs.
“What do you say to people who say you’re a fraud?” I ask.
“My years,” she replies. “My years of validation save me.” She pauses. “If after fifty-three years I was a fraud, don’t you think they would have found out?”
DAY 5: DISEMBARKATION
I jump ship in Athens, two days early. I miss Sylvia’s final lecture. The next day I receive an e-mail from Cassie, the German fan who went off her after she was rude in the shopping arcade. “Please call me!” she writes. “Sylvia talked so harsh about you! I wrote everything down she said!”
I phone her.
“You have no idea what that woman said about you yesterday!” Cassie says. “She got up onstage and said to the audience, ‘Are you guys enjoying the trip?’ And everyone yelled, ‘Yeah! Whooh!’ And then she said, ‘Because I heard that some of you aren’t enjoying the trip.’ And she launched into this huge attack on you! She said, ‘I had an interview with this pale little man and he said I was rude to some of you in the shopping arcade. You must have seen him around. He’s a creepy little worm. . . .’ She said you were a worm and a creep and a dark soul entity. She just went on and on about you. It lasted for about twenty minutes!”
“How did the audience respond?” I ask.
“People didn’t know where the hell this was coming from,” Cassie says. “A few of them said to me afterward, ‘I didn’t pay four thousand euros to listen to someone go on like that.’”
All this proves one thing to me. Now I know for sure that Sylvia isn’t psychic, because I don’t have a dark soul at all. I have a very light soul.
The Fall of a Pop Impresario
September 10, 2001. The Old Bailey trial of the pop mogul and former pop star Jonathan King, in which he is accused of a series of child-sex offenses dating back to the sixties, seventies, and eighties, begins this morning. Back in July, Judge Paget decided, for the purposes of case management, to have three trials instead of one. So the jury will hear only the charges that relate to the years between 1982 and 1987. There are six within this time frame—one buggery, one attempted buggery, and four indecent assaults on boys aged fourteen and fifteen.
I have been having an e-mail correspondence with Jonathan King for the past nine months, and last night he e-mailed me to say, “I think you know, young Ronson, that whichever way it goes for me you could have an award-winning story here, if you’re brave. You can change the face of Great Britain if you do it well. Good luck! JK.”
I have just returned from New York, and in the canteen on the third floor of the Old Bailey—in the minutes before the trial is due to begin—Jonathan King comes over to make small talk about my trip.
“Did you bring me any presents back?” he asks. “Any small boys? Just kidding! Don’t you think it is amazing that I have retained my sense of humor?”
He smiles across the canteen at his arresting officers. They smile faintly back. Jonathan has always told me about his good relationship with the police, how kind they were to him during his arrest, and he looks a little crestfallen at their evident withdrawal of affection.
“The police are far less friendly than they were,” he says. “Quite boot-faced, in fact. And there doesn’t even seem to be a senior officer around. I’m getting quite insulted that I’m so unimportant that only constables are allowed anywhere near the case.”
He looks at me for a response. What should I say? Yes, his crimes are so significant and he is so famous that it would seem appropriate for a more senior officer to be in attendance? In the end, I just shrug.
There are half a dozen journalists here today covering the case. In the lobby outside the court, Jonathan approaches some to shake their hands. “Who’s the gorgeous blonde with a TV cameraman?” he whispers to me. “Sorry if this ruins my image.”
“I felt terrible about shaking his hand,” one reporter says a little later. “I felt disgusting. I was standing there thinking, ‘What’s he done with that hand?’ I should have refused to shake it.”
“I just asked my solicitor if it’s unusual for the accused to make a point of shaking the hands of the press and the prosecution barrister,” Jonathan says as we walk into court. “He said it was absolutely unheard-of!” Jonathan laughs, and adds, “You know, I fully intend to change the legal system just like I changed the pop industry.”
And at that, we take our seats. The jury is selected, and the trial begins.
• • •
ON NOVEMBER 24, 2000, Jonathan King was charged with three child-sex offenses dating back thirty-two years. In the light of the publicity surrounding his arrest, a dozen other boys (now men) came forward to tell police that King had abused them, too, during the seventies and eighties. Some said he picked them up at the Walton Hop, a disco in Walton-on-Thames run by his friend Deniz Corday. Others said he cruised them in his Rolls-Royce in London. He’d pull over and ask why they were out so late and did they know who he was. He was Jonathan King! Did they want a lift?
He told the boys he was conducting market research into the tastes of young people. Did they like his music? His TV shows? Were they fans of Entertainment USA, his BBC2 series? He asked them to complete a questionnaire—written by him—to list their hobbies in order of preference. Cars? Music? Family and friends? Sex? “Oh, really?” Jonathan would say to them. “You’ve only put sex at number two?”
And so they would get talking about sex. He sometimes took them to his Bayswater mews house, with its mirrored toilet and casually scattered photos of naked women on the coffee table. Sometimes he took them to car parks, or to the forests near the Walton Hop. He showed them photographs of naked Colombian air hostesses and Samantha Fox. He could, he said, arrange for them to have sex with the women in the photos.
Sometimes, within the bundle of photographs of naked women he would hand the boys, there would be a picture of himself naked. “Oh!” he’d say, blushing a little. “Sorry. You weren’t supposed to see that one of me!” (When the police raided King’s house, they say they found ten overnight bags, each stuffed with his seduction kit—his questionnaires and photos of Sam Fox and photos of himself naked—all packed and ready for when the urge took him to get into his Rolls-Royce and start driving around.)
He told the boys that it was fine if they wanted to masturbate. And then things would progress from there. Some of the boys reported that his whole body would start to shake as he sat next to them in the Rolls-Royce.
And then he “went for it,” in the words of one victim. None of the boys say he forced himself onto them. They all say they just sat there, awed by his celebrity. The boys all say that Jonathan King has emotionally scarred them for life, although almost all of them returned, on many occasions, and became the victims of more assaults.