I turned in the rock star child rapist. So why was I put on trial?
Ex-lover of depraved Lostprophets star tells MoS: I tipped off police 6 YEARS ago... but they accused ME of sex crimes
THERE are many things about her past that Joanne Mjadzelics finds shameful. This vulnerable single mother will openly admit to a troubled history, i ncluding broken relationships, the use of illegal drugs – and most of all to the fact that she was in thrall to her lover, the paedophile rock star Ian Watkins.
Yet there is at least one point from the past few years from which she can take pride and comfort, because Joanne knows that from the moment she was first exposed to the depravity of his behaviour, she did exactly what she was supposed to do.
Putting her infatuation aside, Joanne, 39, reported her suspicions that Watkins was a predatory paedophile to the police and social services in 2008. She did the same again in 2009, 2011 and 2012 and even sent a letter to the singer’s mother, warning about a particular child who was at risk. They took no action. Desperate, she turned detective, attempting to expose the scale of Watkins’s abuse. Yet the police response was not to merely to ignore her – but to actually put her on trial for the vile images that Watkins had sent her.
Today, after being cleared by a jury at Cardiff Crown Court of possessing indecent images, she is torn by a mixture of emotions – anger, vindication and relief.
‘I felt that I was the only person who saw through his public face of a charming and charismatic musician,’ she says in her first interview. ‘The police wouldn’t listen and it was left for me to stop him. The information I gathered eventually helped to put Ian and two female acolytes away.
‘If just one child was spared, then it was worth the hell I’ve gone through.’
Her campaign ended with Watkins, now 37, being jailed for 35 years after admitting a catalogue of child sex crimes, including the attempted rape of a baby.
She is furious that, in her view, the police had dismissed her as no more than a deranged ex-girlfriend. And she firmly believes that the case against her for possessing indecent images was malicious, a response to her complaint that three police forces had repeatedly failed to act on information she had given them.
Eight officers from three forces are now being investigated by the Independent Police Complaints Commission over allegations that children’s lives were put at risk because of their failures to act. Joanne would like the investigation to be widened to include perverting the course of justice and misconduct in public office.
At home in Doncaster, Joanne is so keen to tell the truth about Watkins that she is prepared to admit that she has had stints as a lap-dancer and escort, to help support herself and her child.
She describes herself as broken financially and emotionally. Her immediate anger, though, is directed against the police. ‘The police and the prosecution service almost destroyed me.
‘They implied that I was not trustworthy because I once worked as an escort. They falsely claimed that I had been a willing supporter of Ian’s perversion.
‘They even said I had sent him some of the pictures.
‘I did what I did because they refused to do their jobs properly and they know it. I was disgusted by what Ian was doing. He is evil. I’ve never met anyone as degenerate as him. He hid his dark side beneath good looks. He had charisma. It made my skin crawl sleeping with him and talking about child porn, but I had to make him think I was supportive. I knew I had to keep him on side to get evidence to trap him.’
Joanne was working in telephone banking when she first made contact with Watkins in December 2006.
A friend introduced her to the music of Lostprophets – a rock band that sold more than 3.5million albums over a 12-year career – and she emailed the group’s website to ask about concert dates. Watkins responded personally – his bandmates have revealed he often used the website to arrange trysts with girls – and they began corresponding.
Joanne says: ‘We exchanged flirty messages followed by Skype calls and emails. He invited me to go as a VIP guest to one of his gigs and we agreed to meet up at a hotel beforehand. He was gorgeous – tall, dark and very handsome. He also had a way of
‘He hid his dark side beneath good looks’ ‘Punished for being a whistleblower’
making you feel you were the most special person in the world. I was totally in love with him.’
Joanne flushes with embarrassment as she says she had sex with him on that first night. ‘I was flattered by his attention. I couldn’t understand why he was interested in someone like me.’
Their next meeting was in February 2007 after Watkins returned from a tour. But their relationship
was an infrequent, if sexually charged affair. Watkins, it seems, had women in every city he visited. Many were fans he’d met online and, as Joanne later discovered, some were twisted enough to offer their children for him to abuse.
Despite five hit albums, Watkins lived with his mother and younger brother in a terrace house in Pontypridd, South Wales.
‘He took me once to meet his mother and kept promising we could have something more lasting. But it was such a casual thing that when we met, it got physical very quickly. We did make one attempt to spend time together in Los Angeles one summer, but he didn’t show up.
‘I never got a sense he was wealthy. We always used hotel rooms and took turns to pay.’
Within months Joanne was so smitten that she had his initials tattooed on her back (since removed). But her biggest regret was that under Watkins’s influence, she became hooked on cocaine. And it was during drug-fuelled encounters that his paedophilia became apparent.
‘He told me that 14-year-old girls let him take their virginity. My son was only 11 at the time and when I became upset, he said he was only joking. I believed him because I didn’t want it to be true.
‘Watkins talked about wanting to have sex with an 11-year-old and described a four-year-old girl as “super flirty”. I persuaded myself that it was off-colour humour. I wanted our relationship to work.’
But once Watkins started to show her graphic images, Joanne felt she had to act. In December 2008, she reported him to Pontypridd Child Services and Rhondda Children’s Services. She was not believed.
In March 2009, police in Yorkshire interviewed Joanne at the behest of South Wales Police and closed the case. ‘I was very frustrated,’ she says. ‘I even wrote to Ian’s mother, warning her that he was a paedophile, but I ended up being accused of harassing his family. At one point Ian even asked me to marry him, just to shut me up.’
She did not see the singer again until August 2010 when they met for sex. ‘He showed me a disgusting child pornographic video on his laptop and I kicked him out of the hotel room. I didn’t report that because the police had already warned me about not harassing him with complaints.’
The next time they spoke was in May 2011, when he contacted her from LA. ‘The same sick texts started to land. He claimed to have raped a five-year-old girl and sent a disgusting image to my phone. So I tracked down the father of one child he said he wanted to abuse and went to the police. Again, no one believed me.’
Joanne resolved to continue their on-off relationship while she gathered evidence. ‘I had to play him. I went into “escort mode”, like with my clients, and I switched off.’
That month, Joanne sent an email to the Association of Chief Police Officers, saying Watkins was raping a child on a ‘regular basis’.
Her email read: ‘I’ve gained his trust again by agreeing to a lot of disgusting things to get whatever is needed to bring him to justice.’
She included a series of graphic messages in which the pair fantasised about raping infants. The warning was ignored and the material was eventually used in court as evidence against Joanne, along with pornographic images of children sent to her by Watkins.
‘When I took my laptop to South Yorkshire Police in 2012, they would not look at the evidence,’ Joanne says. ‘They acted as if I was some crazy stalker.’ She also told Bedfordshire Police the singer was planning to abuse another fan’s baby. Watkins was interviewed and bailed.
He was eventually brought to justice when police raided his home that year on a drugs tip-off and seized his computers. Watkins initially denied any wrongdoing, but finally pleaded guilty after code-breakers found 90 indecent images of children aged from two to 14, and 22 images of bestiality. He was jailed in 2013 after admitting 13 sex offences, including the attempted rape of a baby.
Joanne says that at first the police seemed grateful for the evidence she has gathered: ‘They phoned and said, “Without you, we would not have been able to prosecute him.’’’
But after Watkins pleaded guilty, she revealed on TV that police failed to act on her earlier complaints. Shortly afterwards she was charged. ‘I can’t believe they were so vicious,’ she continues. ‘They wanted to punish me for being a whistleblower.’
She says that Watkins told her he had been the victim of sexual abuse by two paedophiles when he was a boy. ‘He said they would pass him around from the age of seven and that after a while he began to enjoy it. He was a very troubled man.’
Joanne is comforted by the knowledge that she helped put Watkins behind bars.
‘Do I regret meeting him? In some ways I do, because he put me through unimaginable hell,’ she says. ‘But if I had not met him, then he might have carried on abusing other children.’
Matt Jukes, Deputy Chief Constable for South Wales Police, said: ‘We respect the decision of the court. The safeguarding of vulnerable people and children remains our priority and it is right and proper for us to take evidence of this nature to the Crown Prosecution Service.’