Jury hears Glitter told victim: It’s our secret

Gary Glitter faces ten charges relating to three girls. Picture: AP

FORMER singer Gary Glitter sexually assaulted a teenage girl after she had been taken to meet him backstage following a show, a court heard yesterday.

The woman sobbed as she told Southwark Crown Court how she was assaulted in his dressing room at a nightclub in Watford, when she was aged 13 or 14.

Glitter said the assault would be their “secret”, she told the jury.

Glitter, 70, whose real name is Paul Gadd, denies ten charges relating to three girls.

Giving evidence, the woman, now aged 48, said she had been taken to meet him by her mother and her mother’s partner, who worked in the music industry.

The singer then asked if the girl could be left alone with him, she said.

The glam rock artist, who was still wearing a silver sequinned jumpsuit, then asked her to sit on his lap. He asked her for a kiss, before sexually assaulting her, she said.

The ordeal lasted for about ten minutes and only stopped when there was a knock on the dressing room door, she added.

When asked if the singer had said anything to her during the incident, the woman replied: “He asked if I liked it.” She told the court she did not tell anyone about the alleged assault until 2013, when she confided in a counsellor, who advised her to contact the police.

Glitter is accused of two counts of indecent assault in relation to the woman.

Sallie Bennett-Jenkins QC, representing Glitter, put it to the woman that she had made up the allegations.

She said the singer had stopped wearing platform shoes by the time of the alleged offences, because of “the damage done over time to his feet”.

“I am going to suggest that you are wrong on those points of detail,” Ms Bennett-Jenkins added.

However, the alleged victim said: “No, he had his platform shoes on.”

Earlier, the court heard how a girl who “had sex” with Glitter when she was 12 had told her brother she was “going out” with the singer.

The alleged victim – now aged 50 – says the singer had sex with her at a hotel after a show in Leicester, in 1977, after giving her champagne.

In a statement, the brother of the alleged victim said their father had got tickets for his sister and their mother to see the singer perform and to meet him.

His sister, who he said had posters of the entertainer plastered across her bedroom walls and ceiling, had been “ecstatic” at meeting him.

“It was after this that [she] went on to see Gary Glitter – I never went with her,” he said in a statement, read out in court.

“I remember her spending nights away and her telling me that she was going out with Gary Glitter,” he added.

Years later, the alleged victim told her daughter how Glitter had been “bigger than Elvis” and described the first time she slept with him, the jury heard.

In her statement, the daughter of the alleged victim said she had been told about a time her mother found herself alone in a hotel suite with him.

“Mum didn’t go into detail of what went on, other than to say this was the first time she had sex with Gary,” she said in the statement.

In another statement read out to the jury, a family friend said she discovered dried up red roses in the alleged victim’s bedroom with a note signed “love Gary”. The trial continues.