‘Don’t judge BBC host in sex case on her morals’
A RADIO DJ accused of sex with underage boys while her husband watched should not be judged on her morals, her lawyer told a court yesterday.
The barrister told the jury it was ‘unusual’ to take a sexual partner half your age ‘but it does happen’ – and mentioned Joan Collins and French president Emmanuel Macron as examples.
BBC local radio hosts Julie and Tony Wadsworth are charged with several offences involving schoolboys in the 1990s, some as young as 11.
The couple, who presented shows on the WM radio station in Birmingham, allegedly had sex against a tree in a Warwickshire country park and invited watching boys to join in.
One was lured into sex after going into long grass at an adjoining golf club, while others were asked if they ‘wanted to play’ after seeing Mrs Wadsworth, now 60, sunbathing topless, the court heard.
The jury was told her husband, now 69, would keep lookout yards away while she performed sex acts on the youths – on one occasion bringing a camera with him.
In the third week of the trial, lawyers for both defendants addressed the jury, with Mr Wadsworth’s counsel denying their actions could be likened to a ‘seedy Soho club’.
Mrs Wadsworth’s barrister said she was the victim of ‘poisonous and untrue’ allegations and accused the prosecution of a cheap attempt to paint her as ‘salacious and predatory’. Stressing that the jury was trying Mrs Wadsworth on criminal charges rather than assessing her morals, David Hislop QC said she had a genuine belief that boys she met in woodland were not underage. ‘The wisdom of her judgment or morality in the late 1990s is quite irrelevant,’ he told Warwick Crown Court.
‘Unless you are Joan Collins or the president of France it’s unusual to take a sexual partner half your age but it does happen.’
Joan Collins, 84, is 33 years older than her fifth husband Percy Gibson, 51. French president Emmanuel Macron, 39, is married to 64- year- old Brigitte Trogneux.
In court, Mr Hislop criticised the Crown’s use of a charity calendar, with Mrs Wadsworth posing as Lady Godiva, to suggest her career was forged ‘on the twang of a stocking’.
‘This [the calendar] was obviously part of a PR machine that undoubtedly drove rat- ings,’ he said. ‘This, I suggest, is an intelligent and sensible view of what all those publicity photographs were about … one can almost hear the scraping of the bottom of the barrel by the prosecution.’
Barrister Michelle Clarke, for Mr Wadsworth, said the calendar photos were sanctioned by the BBC – and insisted the pair ‘didn’t want to demonstrate in front of others like some seedy Soho club’.
The couple, of Broughton Astley, Leicestershire, are each accused of five counts of outraging public decency. Mrs Wadsworth is also accused of 12 counts of indecent assault.
The trial continues.