Police have been called to a disturbance at the bail hostel where paedophile Gary Glitter is staying after his release from prison.
A crowd of people are understood to have gathered outside the property in Hampshire yesterday after the disgraced 79-year-old former pop star was released from prison the day before, having served half his 16-year sentence for sexually abusing three schoolgirls.
Glitter, whose real name is Paul Gadd, left HMP The Verne – a low security category C jail in Portland, Dorset – after eight years behind bars.
Protesters outside the bail hostel, which is in a residential area, reportedly demanded he be removed from their neighbourhood, with one man attempting to scale a fence.
The protest came as Richard Scorer, head of the abuse law team at Slater and Gordon – which represents one of Glitter’s victims – said his release was “particularly distressing and traumatic” for those he attacked.
“The early release devalues her suffering and that of his other victims,” he added.
A Hampshire police spokesperson said last night: “Police were called at 3.32pm today to reports of a public order incident. Officers attended the scene and the situation was resolved.
“No arrests were made.”
Disgraced singer’s sex crimes
Glitter, who had a string of chart hits in the 1970s, was convicted and jailed in 2015 for the historic sex attacks.
He had attacked two girls, aged 12 and 13, after inviting them backstage to his dressing room and isolating them from their mothers.
The singer crept into the bed of his third victim, a girl aged under 10 at the time, in an attempt to rape her in 1975.
The allegations came to light nearly 40 years later, when Glitter became the first person to be arrested under Operation Yewtree – the investigation launched in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal.
Glitter’s fall from grace had happened years earlier after he admitted possessing around 4,000 child pornography images and was jailed for four months in 1999.
In 2002, he was expelled from Cambodia amid reports of sex crime allegations, and in March 2006 was convicted of sexually abusing two girls, aged 10 and 11, in Vietnam and spent two-and-a-half years in prison.
His release from HMP The Verne came automatically halfway through a fixed-term determinate sentence, and he will now be subject to licence conditions.
A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “Sex offenders like Paul Gadd are closely monitored by the police and Probation Service and face some of the strictest licence conditions, including being fitted with a GPS tag.
“If the offender breaches these conditions at any point, they can go back behind bars.”
