CAN JOHN LESLIE EVER SHAKE OFF HIS SEEDY PAST?
As the ex-Blue Peter star faces new sex attack claim . . .
DOMINATING a leafy corner of a London suburb stands the house John Leslie built. A stone’s throw from Richmond Park, it has five bedrooms, four bathrooms, a cinema room, steam room, gym, bar and music room. And that’s just inside. On the roof of the building — all cedar cladding, glass and zinc — is a secluded terrace kitted out with a hot tub, barbecue and shower. So, a big house with a big price tag. Today it is worth £5.5 million. But to find Leslie’s current home you have to travel 400 miles north to Edinburgh.
It is a bungalow that has three bedrooms, one bathroom and a couple of reception rooms. With a disabled parking space on the road directly in front, it seems more pensioner’s retreat than bachelor pad, and is worth just a tenth as much as the one-time television presenter’s former London house. But that’s not the only thing that has changed in Leslie’s life. The 50-year- old once earned £350,000 a year, but now rakes in a fraction of that sum. Yes, he is still a media and showbusiness personality. But where once he dated Catherine Zeta- Jones and fronted ITV’s This Morning, today he works as a disc jockey at a local radio station and once a week at a nearby nightclub.
He was meant to be there tonight to celebrate the venue’s birthday — £7 a ticket, complimentary buffet and a chance to set eyes on ‘Big J’, as the 6ft 4in Scot is known locally.
According to flyers produced for the event, the celebrity host would be introducing a ‘night of surprises’.
As it turns out, the only surprise is that Leslie won’t be there tonight after all.
His appearance was cancelled after he was questioned by police a week ago, in circumstances that will sound all too familiar to those who have followed the story of the former Blue Peter presenter’s extra-ordinaryrise and fall.
Last week, after attending a radio awards ceremony in Edinburgh, he was accused of sexually assaulting a 22- year- old woman. He was interviewed by police about the alleged incident and detectives were later seen leaving his home carrying evidence bags.
For now, that is pretty much all that can be said. Police in Scotland will confirm only that their inquiries are ‘ongoing’. As for Leslie, who has not been charged, he has declined to comment.
Of course, the fact of his arrest does not mean that he is guilty of any offence. After all, he has been here twice before — and has never been convicted of any crime.
In October 2002 he was named as the alleged rapist of Ulrika Jonsson, an accusation that he has always denied but which opened the floodgates for allegations against him of sexual assault on a number of other young women.
Charged the following year with assaulting a 23-year- old, he walked free from Southwark Crown Court after prosecutors dropped the case.
But five years later he faced fresh accusations of rape. This time his accuser claimed to have been attacked in 1995 when she was in her early 20s. In the end, the case never reached court.
Not that it heralded a new dawn for Leslie. By then, revelations about drug- fuelled parties and sexual debauchery had left his reputation in tatters. Ostracised by the television industry, Leslie headed home to Edinburgh to try to start a new life.
So the events of last week will have been especially devastating for him and those around him.
‘What no one realises is the effect on those close to him like his mum, dad and brother,’ said an acquaintance. ‘It’s hard to believe it is all happening again.’
That Leslie remains acutely aware of what he has lost — in financial terms, if nothing else — was laid bare in a rare interview he gave to the financial section of a broadsheet newspaper last month.
In it, he spelt out exactly how, in little more than a decade, he had risen from being a newsagent’s son from nowhere to the top of a very lucrative profession.
Training as a piano teacher, the teenage Leslie had started DJ-ing at a disco in his spare time. He did well, getting gigs at bigger and bigger clubs before being invited to submit a show-reel for a job presenting a music show on a satellite channel.
Then, in 1989, the BBC called him in for audition and he landed the coveted job of Blue Peter presenter, on a salary of £16,800.
Leslie correctly calculated that the job would lead to other, more lucrative, opportunities — as it duly did when he moved on five years later.
‘I did a short-lived big-budget, Gladiators-style show called Scavengers in 1994 and earned £15,000 an episode,’ he recalled. ‘That was when I realised I was earning decent money.’
He then started presenting Wheel of Fortune, initially filming three shows a week at £2,000 a show. His income was further boosted to £350,000 a year when, in 2001, he began presenting This Morning with Fern Britton.
He has described himself as a
‘It’s hard to believe it’s all happening again’
spender rather than a saver, who found that with the money came the lifestyle — and then some.
While he was at Blue Peter, he dated the actress Catherine Zeta-Jones for 18 months, admitting in later years that she was the only woman he ever truly loved. Not that it held him back after their split.
I should have been far more responsible, sensitive and aware,’ he has said. ‘someone said if i’d been a rock star it would have been accepted, whereas because i was a Blue Peter presenter, people were out to get me.
I didn’t know how to handle my private life. The party was 24/7 and i trusted too many people, and soon enough the wheels were going to come off.’
And that, unfortunately for him, is exactly what happened.
in 2002, Leslie was accidentally named by Channel 5 TV host Matthew Wright as being at the centre of rape claims by Ulrika Jonsson. she had published an autobiography in which she claimed to have been raped by a television presenter while she was working as a weathergirl 15 years earlier.
Ms Jonsson has never named her alleged attacker, but the accusation prompted widespread speculation in the media, which culminated in Leslie’s naming. The ensuing coverage led to multiple complaints from other women.
One accuser said he pinned her against a wall in a bathroom at the sanderson hotel in Central London and indecently assaulted her. A student who dated him for two months said he repeatedly took cocaine and pestered her to join in group and lesbian sex sessions.
Another woman said Leslie once cornered her in a changing hut and molested her.
‘ i pushed him off. But he just looked at me and walked out as if nothing had happened,’ she said.
Yet another said she met him in a nightclub, and that he groped her and exposed himself after inviting her and two friends back to his hotel room.
in the end, Leslie was charged with two counts of indecent assault against an actress from the North-East. But on the eve of the trial she presented the police with ‘ new information’ and the charges were shelved.
Leslie famously left the court having been told that he did so ‘without a stain on his character’.
But the damage had been done. Photographs had emerged of him taking cocaine, and a stolen sex tape of a threesome involving Leslie and his then girlfriend Abi Titmuss, a nurse who went on to become a glamour model, was leaked on the internet.
With a £500,000 legal bill to pay, and with iTV having ended his contract, Leslie was forced to look elsewhere for funds.
No doubt imagining that his career would one day be revived, he turned his hand to property developing. After all, he had already overseen the construction of his multimillionpound dream home.
But while it has been reported that he made a fortune by renovating several flats and a nursing home in London, it seems he was hit hard by the 2008 financial crash.
After renting out his bachelor pad for a number of years, in 2010 Leslie had no choice but to part with it.
‘i pleaded with the bank to let me keep the Richmond house but was forced to sell it for £3.5 million when the crash hit and the bank wanted its money back,’ he said.
‘i paid them back every penny, but there was nothing left. i thought i was going to get out with some money but i sold at the worst time.’
By then he was living back in Edinburgh, where he bought a bungalow close to his septuagenarian parents, Leslie and Lexia stott (their son took ‘Leslie’ as his stage surname).
he would go on to buy other properties nearby, though the investments don’t appear to have been entirely trouble-free. One six-bedroom house was bought for £1.25 million in 2006. it was put back on the market for £2.5 million in 2009, but eventually sold in 2013 for £1.8 million — a decent sum, although the lavish renovations that Leslie undertook would doubtless have eaten into the profit. he also bought two neighbouring bungalows, including the one he now lives in. The other was sold to a couple from London for £485,000.
Not surprisingly, Leslie was keen to get back to working in the entertainment industry — so he took up the offer of a weekly slot DJ- ing at Edinburgh’s Cav nightclub, for which he was paid £400 a time.
he also recently landed a daily slot on local radio station Forth 2, playing greatest hits from the back catalogue.
As for his personal life, it is understood Leslie is currently single. he split from Miss Titmuss in 2004, after which his ex-girlfriend made her name as a glamour model, appearing on the covers of men’s magazines such as Loaded and FHM.
she also worked as a presenter on a TV porn channel and featured on reality shows such as Gordon Ramsay’s hell’s kitchen and Celebrity Love island.
A book exploring her ‘ sexual fantasies’ followed, as well as shortlived romances with footballer Lee sharpe and comedian and author David Walliams.
More recently she has turned to reinventing herself as a serious actress, moving to Los Angeles and using the name Abi Evelyn.
Leslie, meanwhile, has been involved in several relationships. While these include three years that he spent with a psychologist, others were more short-lived.
Among them was city worker Angela stewart, who split with him after becoming fed up with his cocainefuelled rages and repeated attempts to persuade her to take part in threesomes.
A 12- month relationship then followed with Rachel Bentley, almost 20 years his junior.
Their time together was not easy — they split temporarily after Leslie cheated on her with a transsexual called Talisa Luci — and came to an end when, in January 2006, she informed him that she was pregnant. she claims he told her: ‘You are just trying to trap me. i hate you.’
After their daughter isabelle was born in August that year, Leslie initially had no contact with her, instead sending her mother a DNA testing kit in the post.
‘i was actually halfway to doing it when it suddenly hit me how insulting and sordid this was,’ she has recalled.
‘ i returned it to him with a sarcastic note saying i hoped he would get his money back.’
Given that start, it might be hard to see how Leslie could ever have rebuilt those burnt bridges.
But it appears he has, and that he now plays an active role in his nine- year- old daughter’s life. For some years she has spent regular weekends with him, visiting and staying with him at his home in Edinburgh.
And so, with new work to occupy him and his role as a father, Leslie must have imagined the worst was behind him.
instead, this week found him holed up at home, off the airwaves and waiting for the outcome of another police investigation.
‘if i sound bitter it’s because i am,’ he told reporters after being questioned by police over the 2008 allegations.
‘i ask, when is this nightmare going to end?’
it’s a question, one imagines, that he never dreamed he would ever be asking again.
One date said he pestered her to join in group sex
He used to earn £350,000 — now he DJs in a nightclub