Why did a judge rule this man can’t have sex without giving police 24 hrs notice?
It seems an extreme sanction against a man with no convictions. But read this disturbing interview and decide for yourself if he’s a danger to women
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
an infringement of his human rights as he has effectively been denied the right to form a relationship.
‘I do not overstate when I say that since the start of the interim order, I cannot have an intimate relationship and cannot work,’ he says.
‘I can barely function in any other capacity. Convicted murderers and rapists do not get orders as devastating as this. I was acquitted of the only crime I have ever been accused of.’
So why is it that police are convinced Mr O’Neill poses such a danger? To understand more it is necessary to turn the clock back a decade.
In 2007, Mr O’Neill’s life as a family man came to an abrupt end. The relationship with his partner broke down and he moved out of the family home. Wanting a ‘fresh start’, he enrolled as an English Literature student at York St John University.
While the first couple of years passed without incident, things started to go wrong, he says, after he became engaged to a Japanese student.
She returned to Japan in 2010, discovered she was pregnant and, against his wishes, underwent a termination.
This cast him into a spiral of depression.
‘I became suicidal, withdrawn, depressed, and felt I had lost everything,’ he said. ‘My fiancee had lost a child and was very ill after the event.’ He added that he had no money because he was paying for his fiancee’s treatment in Japan. Penniless, he dropped out of his course and ended up sleeping rough.
Then, in 2012, he started a two-year, casual relationship with a student at York University. She was a member of its fetish society — FetSoc — and introduced Mr O’Neill to the S&M scene.
His explanation as to why it appealed to him many will strike many as bizarre.
He tells me that she, like him, had lost a baby and that S&M helped ‘drown out the pain of grief’ and was a ‘healthy outlet for two people in emotional hell’.
Among the scenarios they acted out was one in which he would pretend to rape her.
SHE would dress up as a ‘sexy secretary’ and he would take the role of the sinister intruder who, having broken into an office girl’s home, was overcome with lust and forces her to have sex.
This was, he insists, simply role-play.
‘In terms of role-play, it is easily the most common you will see at these fetish clubs, by miles,’ he says.
‘There is a difference between having a rape fantasy and enacting a fantasy rape, and it is quite significant. If someone sits around fantasising about rape that is a serious problem. If someone is engaging in fantasy rape, which was what everyone at FetSoc does, it is just role-play.’
Other sexual practices they indulged in — such as whipping, choking and burning one another with hot wax — were consensual, he says.
What happened next would lead directly to the situation in which Mr O’Neill currently finds himself.
In April 2014, suffering from a sore throat and cold, he went to see Dr Miriam Hodgson, a GP.
During the consultation, he told her he was suffering from depression and then talked about his sex life in a way that left her so deeply concerned that she feared for her own personal safety.
In notes taken at the time she wrote: ‘He thinks he might have raped someone.’
She also observed: ‘He says he needs to be stopped.’
With regard to a previous partner, Dr Hodgson noted: ‘Patient thinks about killing her . . . has choked her unconscious several times.’ Shaken by what she had heard, she referred him to a psychiatric nurse at Bootham Hospital, York, and placed ‘alert’ on his NHS file. In a follow-up session with community psychiatric nurse Kevin Holmes, Mr O’Neill is said to have revealed he had harboured sexually violent feelings since adolescence. According to the medical notes, ‘He saw a TV drama . . . a picture of a prostitute being murdered... he was excited by this.’ The programme in question was an episode of the American detective series Columbo. He also allegedly told the nurse: ‘Every girl I have slept with, I have been sexually violent with and would hit, bite, cut and burn to the point of unconsciousness. I needed them to be scared or I could not respond. I found it difficult to climax.’ It is also claimed he told the nurse that he had been sexually violent towards girlfriends and was not sure whether they consented. Looking back, Mr O’Neill claims he was ‘misunderstood’. He assumed the medic knew that he was speaking about consensual role-play rather than confessing to being a ‘rapist in training’. ‘I think I have to take some of the responsibility,’ he says. ‘I mean I was stupid to say some of the things I said without qualification. ‘I thought I was talking to a grown-up. She (Dr Hodgson) had only qualified as a doctor four years previously. She was only parttime. She didn’t know jack about anything.’ These conversations might have stayed private were it not for the fact that four months later Mr O’Neill was accused of rape. His medical notes formed part of the prosecution case, and Dr Hodgson was called to give evidence in both trials. And so it is that we come back to the court case. I ask Mr O’Neill why it is he thinks the judge took the highly unusual step of delivering such a direct and damning warning about a man he had just seen cleared of rape. ‘He clearly didn’t understand S&M,’ he says dismissively. ‘You could tell by the questions he was asking. And he didn’t get how