I’ve brought a lot of this on myself but I am NOT a marauding animal
Time after time John Leslie faced sexual assault claims... as he’s cleared once more he defiantly insists:
EVEN in our age of #metoo reckoning, few British men have been dogged by as much scandal as John Leslie. The former host of Blue Peter and This Morning, loved by the camera for his broad smile and energetic, boyish charm, has had his oncesqueaky clean reputation left in such tatters that even his closest friends jokingly refer to him as ‘that disgraced John Leslie’.
Black humour indeed. For Leslie has been investigated several times over separate sexual assault allegations made to police since 2002. Dozens of other women have publicly accused him of similar seedy behaviour, while a sequence of tabloid exposés have laid bare salacious revelations about his sex life (including his starring role in a threesome sex tape) and his use of cocaine.
Only last month he found himself in court and in the headlines once more, this time accused of sexually assaulting a bride-to-be on her hen do in an Edinburgh nightclub. Once more, he was cleared: his case found not proven thanks to CCTV footage of the alleged incident.
For many, his innocence remains unimportant. On the basis that there can be no smoke without fire, ‘that disgraced John Leslie’ must have been up to his old tricks again. It’s certainly true that to be unjustly accused of sexual assault once could be considered misfortune. To happen as often as it has to the Scot starts to appear more than coincidence.
So, I ask ‘disgraced John Leslie’, how do you explain the pattern?
‘I totally accept I’ve brought a lot of this on myself,’ he says, in his first interview since the latest case. ‘In my 20s and 30s – that wasn’t my finest hour. But I will still say to this day that I’ve never had any signs of anyone being uncomfortable.
‘If my behaviour has upset anybody, then I apologise. It may have been inappropriate or not received in the right way. But I’ve never assaulted anyone, ever. I just wouldn’t do it. I don’t get aggressive, I get excitable.’
Clearly not everyone has seen it that way. But he is adamant he has never been a ‘marauding animal’ (his words) who takes advantage of women. Once again, though, he is paying a heavy price for his behaviour. ‘Even though I was cleared, I still lost,’ he says. ‘It scares the hell out of me the fact that any guy could be put in that situation.
‘Once again, I’ve lost a year of my life. I lost dignity, respect, and I’m unemployable again, even though I was acquitted.’
Nursing a fresh orange and soda at a cafe in Clapham, South-West London, Leslie has brought along a friend’s pet Alaskan Klee Kai, which he’s been dog-sitting since the latest court verdict. He isn’t sleeping well, he admits, and if it weren’t for the dog, he wouldn’t go out. ‘Previously I’ve somehow been able to pick myself up and dust myself down, but I’ve never felt so sad for so long. The intensity of the last year has brought all the old trauma back.’
And what a lot of trauma there has been. In 2002, Leslie, then 37, was riding high. The man who had once dated Catherine Zeta-Jones was presenting This Morning alongside Fern Britton and looked to have a rewarding TV career ahead of him.
But behind the scenes at Leslie’s £3.5million Richmond mansion, which he shared with then-girlfriend, nurse turned pin-up Abi Titmuss, a rather more hedonistic lifestyle was being played out. It all began to crumble when former weather girl Ulrika Jonsson, whom Leslie had dated over several weeks in 1988, released an autobiography in which she claimed a TV presenter had raped her around the same time. While she has never named her attacker, there was frenzied speculation it was Leslie – speculation Jonsson failed to quell, even when a Channel 5 presenter blurted it aloud.
‘It absolutely was not me,’ he says of Jonsson’s alleged assailant. ‘She was one of my first proper girlfriends in London and I didn’t attack her. When my name was first mentioned, I wanted to say, “Ulrika and I were in a relationship, these are the things we did”.
‘I just hope she regrets doing what she did. It was brutal. Unforgivable, really. I think it impacted her career just as badly, in a way.
‘She lit a fire and it went out of control. I haven’t spoken to her since. What could you say?’
And so it became ‘open season’ on John Leslie – no longer the darling of the TV sofas, but the sex-pest pariah. Days later, photographs appeared in a Sunday newspaper of Leslie taking cocaine, which led to bosses at This Morning terminating his contract. A sex tape was leaked of Leslie and Abi with another woman. Then a steady stream of women came forward to accuse him of sexual assault.
Many reportedly described identical scenarios: being pinned against a bed or wall by Leslie’s considerable frame, and being told ‘You know you want it’.
Four went to the police, and by December 2002 he had been arrested on suspicion of raping one woman and assaulting two others. Leslie denied every allegation, but the damage was done.
‘All the allegations started to come out. Before this,
there was not one story about me behaving inappropriately. Then, overnight, I went from nice guy about town and party boy to suddenly he’s this marauding animal. ‘If I’d been a rock star, no one would have batted an eyelid. But if you’ve been something like a Blue Peter presenter, you’re not meant to have seedy sex, or any kind of sex, for that matter. I realise my behaviour’s not been right at times. But I will say, to this day, I’ve never seen any signs of anyone being upset. It’s not my thing.’
It sounds bitter, but perhaps that’s understandable.
In the aftermath that followed, he was branded a sexual predator who exploited his fame to take advantage of vulnerable women. Lawyers advised him to say nothing, to go into hiding. It left him contemplating suicide.
‘I wanted to die because I thought, with me finally out of the way, everyone would leave my mum and dad alone. The coverage was relentless. It was more of a protective thing for my parents, just to stop it.’
Only one allegation – for sexual assault – progressed to trial, and the case was thrown out when the credibility of the prosecution witness collapsed. Friends who supported him included former flame Zeta-Jones, now married to Hollywood actor Michael Douglas, and of whom he is still ‘very fond’.
‘After the first court case she and Michael were very supportive. Michael even called my mother to say that Catherine spoke very highly of me and how pleased they were at the outcome.’
Clearing him, the judge told Leslie he could leave court ‘without a stain on your character’.
It wasn’t to be so straightforward; he found himself unemployable, his name tarnished by scandal.
He returned to Edinburgh to become a property developer, only for the 2008 banking crisis to leave him virtually destitute. Two further sexual assault claims followed: one in 2008 – relating to an incident following a party in 1995 – and the other in 2015 when he is said to have assaulted a woman at a radio awards party while working as a local DJ. Both were investigated by police and then dropped.
Then came the latest sorry chapter. It began in June last year, when Leslie was in talks to appear on Celebrity Big Brother, for a reputed £500,000 fee.
A woman celebrating her hen party in Edinburgh’s Atik nightclub claimed he had put his hand down the back of her trousers while she was dancing with him, and reported him to police for sexual assault.
‘I was trying to be nice by dancing with her, nothing more. My behaviour was entirely appropriate because she was going to be a bride. I was trying to help make her day special, and she was happy in my company. It was upsetting to find my efforts had been turned into something they weren’t.
‘It was about half an hour after I left her that it all kicked off. When we were dancing, she couldn’t have been happier.
‘I’m 100 per cent convinced the allegation would not have been made if it wasn’t me.’
The case came before Edinburgh’s Sheriff Court last month where experts said Leslie’s DNA was found on the back waistband of the trousers, but could have been transferred by indirect contact.
It was CCTV from the club, dug up by Leslie’s defence team, which cast doubt on the woman’s claim.
‘The police were pretty selective in their evidence-gathering and it wasn’t so much a rush to charge me, but a stampede.
‘We’d secured the CCTV footage and although it wasn’t great, it showed my hand for the whole three minutes and ten seconds of the dance near as damn it in the same position, with twirls, separation, and her hands round my neck pulling me towards her.
‘It was obvious gold dust for us and really important.’
Ultimately, Sheriff Adrian Cottam found the case not proven. While he said the woman’s evidence appeared credible, he concluded the evidence seen all together caused reasonable doubt. Leslie said it ended a ‘year of hell’. But the truth is, such familiar allegations begin to sound rather more than misfortune. At the very least, one might have expected a man in Leslie’s position to go to extraordinary lengths to stay out of trouble.
So was dancing at a hen night not a little reckless, to say the least? After all, he is a 53-year-old man with a very fragile reputation.
‘I think I’ve put myself in situations I shouldn’t have been in,’ he explains. ‘I take the blame for that. The last two occasions, I was just trying to be nice. I should not have taken that girl home after the radio awards. I should have seen the warning signs, even though we were both single, even though nothing happened. I won’t give a girl a dance any more. I can’t put myself in that position.’
Still, he accepts there are ‘issues’, which he is working through with a therapist. I ask what issues these might be. ‘The way that I am with other people,’ he says. ‘You can’t be a big kid, jumping about the place, exuberant all the time.
‘I’m such a positive person, I couldn’t understand how that could be a negative. But if I’m continually getting myself into situations, is it a need in me?
‘At school, girls didn’t fancy me. I was a geek, I was tall, I was the guy always in school uniform.
‘It wasn’t until I began DJing that it all changed. It went from nothing to suddenly girls queuing up. I didn’t have sex until I had left school and my inexperience with women meant, I’m not afraid to admit, I didn’t know how to treat them properly.
‘By the time I went to London and ended up on national TV, I had a lot of offers. Did I take advantage by saying “Yes”? That’s not a crime.’
Nor, he admits, does it make him blameless. ‘Does something need to be fixed? It’s going to be a long road.’
These days, Leslie concedes there is no more ‘seedy sex’. In fact, he says his life has largely settled down into cosy domesticity.
His new girlfriend, who he does not want to name, has him following a healthy lifestyle which includes Bikram, also known as ‘hot yoga’, to relax. He is also enjoying being a father to Isabelle, 11, his daughter from a brief relationship with Rachel Bentley, a woman he met in a bar and treated callously when she became pregnant – sending her a DNA testing kit to confirm the child was his and making no further contact with the pair for four years. Now, he concedes he was ‘an a***’.
‘It’s a bit frustrating I can’t be the dad that I’d like to be because we’re so far apart, but I’m trying.’
The past year has been such an awakening for him that he’s been writing an album of classical music, taking him back to his early roots as a piano tuner. He hopes it will be his salvation – but he hasn’t felt able to write a note since being accused of sexual assault last year.
He says: ‘I know I will finally be fixed when I can sit down at the piano and start to write again.’
This time, perhaps, he will not hit yet another wrong note.
I’ve never assaulted anyone. I don’t get aggressive
I put myself in situations… I need to see the warning signs