Why did a judge rule this man can’t have sex without giving police 24 hrs notice?

LITTLE more than ten years ago, John O’Neill was enjoying the sort of comfortable, middleclass lifestyle many dream of. A family man, he owned his own home on the outskirts of York, living there with his long-term partner and their two young daughters.

As well as bringing up the children, both held down high-powered jobs; she in marketing and he as a sought-after computer consultant. Today things could hardly be more different. At the age of 45, Mr O’Neill is unemployed and struggling to survive on state handouts. He is single. Having separated, his partner has moved to America, taking the children with her.

As for his living arrangements, they consist of a one-man tent erected in scrubland on the outskirts of the city. He cooks on an open fire and spends the days wandering around his local shopping centre in a vain bid to kill time.

And, to top it all, he has very publicly been branded a sexual predator who is a risk to any woman who crosses his path.

‘It is just a ridiculous, tragic mess,’ he told me this week. The million-dollar question is: Where did it all go wrong?

Mr O’Neill is in no doubt. He claims he is the innocent victim of a conspiracy involving everyone from a former female friend to his GP and the police.

All he was ever guilty of, he insists, was to indulge in a bit of light sadomasochism, or S&M — the sort of thing featured in the blockbusting Fifty Shades Of Grey series of books.

To say not everyone agrees with that version of events, or the innocent manner in which Mr O’Neill portrays himself, is an understatement.

Indeed, police are so concerned at the risk they say he poses that they have been granted stringent controls on the way he conducts his day-to-day life.

As well as monitoring his online activities around the clock, they have secured a controversial court order that requires him to give the police 24 hours notice if he intends to have sex.

He must inform them of the woman’s name and address, so allowing officers to warn her in advance of any intimate contact.

Inevitably, when details of this ‘sex ban’ were first made public earlier this year, they grabbed the headlines both here and abroad.

But the controversy has been further fanned by Mr O’Neill himself — who has vocally protested about his treatment since being identified as the man on whom the ban has been imposed.

Appearing on BBC2’ s Victoria Derbyshire show last week, he cut a forlorn figure as he spoke about his ‘victimisation’ at the hands of the police.

But dig a little deeper and the worrying questions about this extraordinary case simply will not go away. Because the fact of the matter is that Mr O’Neill’s life went off the rails long before the socalled sex ban was imposed.

Meanwhile, many will find his sexual leanings, which have included a fascination with a practice known as ‘rape play’, hard to dismiss merely as ‘Fifty Shades’ fantasies.

And then there is Mr O’Neill himself. He admits to me that he comes across as ‘arrogant’, that he has a problem with people in authority and that he has been ‘stupid and naïve’ in the past. Others are more damning still.

‘Narcissistic’ and ‘manipulative’, was the way in which one judge dealing with the case branded him.

ANOTHEr was even more to the point. Mr O’Neill, he said, was a ‘ very dangerous individual’. Those words are all the more extraordinary because they were delivered at the end of a trial last November in which Mr O’Neill had been tried and cleared of rape.

Understandably, he makes great play of this acquittal, describing how the jury cleared him ‘ unanimously’ and telling anyone who will listen how he believes his accuser should be charged with perjury.

But the reality is that this was the second trial Mr O’Neill had faced on the same charge involving the same victim. The first case was heard at York Crown Court in March 2015 and ended with the jury being unable to reach a verdict, prompting the re-trial.

It centred on the claims of a young woman who accused Mr O’Neill — someone she had considered to be a friend — of suddenly turning on her one night in July 2014.

While visiting her home, she claimed he graphically described how he had tortured and raped one woman before ‘hanging her to death’, had burned his mother with an iron and set her on fire, and got a third woman to re-enact a rape she had been subjected to.

She said a ‘wild’ looking Mr O’Neill then picked her up and carried her into her bedroom, where he raped her.

He had, she added, suddenly changed from a friend and confidant to someone who was ‘like a monster’, with ‘pure anger and hate in his eyes’.

And she alleged he told her: ‘I forgot, you are one of those good girls.’

Mr O’Neill denied he had forced himself on her and insisted they had, in fact, kissed and cuddled before having consensual sex on her bed.

The jury was also told that in the weeks following the alleged attack, the woman had continued to chat to him on Facebook.

FOr reasons we shall never know, the jury in the first trial could not reach a verdict. The second jury did, clearing Mr O’Neill. While he says this means he is ‘ an innocent man with no convictions, not even a parking ticket’, the intervention of the judge at the end of the second trial meant that would not be the end of the matter.

After the jury had been discharged, recorder Simon Bourne-Arton QC, the head judge at Teesside, told the female prosecutor: ‘Please could you inform the authorities although this man has been acquitted it is my judgment he is a very dangerous individual.’

North Yorkshire Police clearly concurred with that opinion and were quick to act — something Mr O’Neill claims was motivated out of ‘ sour grapes’ at having ‘lost’ the case.

In December, magistrates granted police what is known as a Sexual risk Order (SrO). Brought under a new law, SrOs are designed to protect the public from potential offenders without convictions who are believed to pose a threat.

The terms of Mr O’Neill’s SrO mainly deal with the imposition of controls on the way he uses the internet on his phone and computer, allowing police to monitor what he has been looking at. He was, for example, banned from deleting his browser history.

He was also ordered to make available for inspection by police ‘any device capable of making phone calls, text messages or used for any other communication purposes’.

But it was the final prohibition that proved the most controversial.

It reads: ‘ Engaging in any sexual activity with any female unless this is disclosed to the police force in the area in which you reside. You must disclose the details of any female including her name, address and date of birth. You must do this at least 24 hours prior to any sexual activity taking place.’

Mr O’Neill complains that the practical effect of the order has been two-fold. First, he says he is unable to work. This is because any work he does is computer-based and any computer he uses is liable for ‘inspection’ by police — a disincentive to any potential employers.

Second, he claims the ban on his right to have sex in the normal way is