Child sex shame of harpist who played for the Queen
don’t hurt me.” I was sobbing. ‘He carried on and carried on and on and on and on.’
Asked in court why she did not report the attack at the time, Perrett said: ‘I perform for very highprofile people and now is perhaps an example of what I feared, because in the past two years [since the arrest] my career has been completely dismantled and with it virtually all of my income.’
Barton-Wood, meanwhile, was already assaulting the boy. He’d gained his trust by asking him if he would like to do some repairs and maintenance on his boat, the Hobgoblin, which he kept on the Suffolk coast.
The victim told the court that Barton-Wood assaulted him on overnight sailing trips on the yacht and during camping trips to Holland and Germany. Perrett and Barton-Wood split up in 1985 and Perrett’s career took off.
She played the harp in front of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh at Prince Philip’s 70th birthday party; she performed, too, for the Prince of Wales and Diana, Princess of Wales, the Princess Royal, the Earl of Wessex and the Duchess of York.
There were performances at festivals in Europe, Australia, America, Russia and the Far East, where she performed compositions especially written for her.
Not only that, but she conducted scholarly research on the subject of the harp and wrote, eloquently, how her two period instruments, which date from the 19th century, ‘had given her practical insights into the Classical and Romantic harp repertoire’.
She wrote, she released CDs, she played the harp in the BBC film of Jane Austen’s Persuasion in 1995. She also taught and was head of the harp department at the London College of Music, and taught music history at Goldsmiths’ College.
Perrett especially loved to travel and perform on cruise liners.
‘Danielle’s favourite destinations have been Norway for its timelessly wonderful natural scenery, Iceland (especially for the Blue Lagoon!), Ephesus (for the wonderful ancient monuments) and the Mediterranean in general for its warmth and sunshine),’ it states on one of her biography sites.
ANoTHER says: ‘Such a varied and exciting career has had its funny and even bizarre moments and Danielle tells of these with wit and candour.’
In 1995, Perrett married a composer, and the couple moved into a large property in Sudbury, Suffolk. Who could argue that she pretty much had it all?
So it must have been with absolute horror when one day in 2007 she took a call from the boy who’d shared her bed, all those years ago. Perrett suggested the boy had phoned her to blackmail her.
She told the court: ‘He said, “Seeing as you are doing very nicely and seeing that you have got a very nice place here and seeing as I have nothing and seeing as I came to London to your gargantuan apartment and seeing that I slept in your enormous bed – and what do you think?”
‘I was very wary because of the tone of his voice – I didn’t like the tone of his voice.’
In January last year, Perrett was arrested at her home and taken into police custody. She was charged in June.
In court, Perrett and BartonWood studiously avoided eye contact. They were perhaps confident that their veneer of respectability would convince the jury of their innocence – that they were victims of a blackmail plot by a sad individual they once befriended out of kindness. They were wrong.
Perrett was found guilty by a majority verdict of six counts of indecent assault after nine hours of deliberations at Ipswich Crown Court.
Barton-Wood was convicted by a majority verdict of seven counts of indecent assault and one count of attempted indecent assault.
Giving his closing speech, Prosecutor William Carter QC said: ‘What they [Perrett and BartonWood] fear is clear, what they fear is precisely what has now happened so many years later – namely a fear of their past, which they would no doubt rather forget and put behind them, coming out.’
And now the worst has happened and it’s unlikely Danielle Perrett will ever perform before royalty, or possibly anyone else, ever again.