The Crimes of Gary Glitter: From Glam Rock Star to Britain's Most Notorious Paedophile Pop Star

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Collage of Gary Glitter in a white glam rock suit and in later life wearing sunglasses, over a newspaper front page headlined Gary Glitter on 50 child porn charges, with the title The Crimes of Gary Glitter

In the early 1970s Gary Glitter was one of the biggest acts in Britain. He had the stacked boots, the silver suits and a terrace chant of a song that's still bellowed at football grounds today. By the end of the 1990s that career was finished for good, and what followed was a string of convictions across two continents that's still going in 2026. This is the full record of what he did, how he was caught each time and where the case stands now.

Quick Answers

Gary Glitter's real name is Paul Francis Gadd. He was born in Banbury, Oxfordshire, on 8 May 1944.
He was first convicted in 1999, after a computer repair worker found child abuse images on his laptop. He got four months and served about two.
In 2006 a court in Vietnam convicted him of obscene acts with two young girls and jailed him for three years.
In 2015 he was jailed for 16 years at Southwark Crown Court for sexually abusing three schoolgirls in the 1970s and 1980s.
He was freed on licence in February 2023, recalled to prison within weeks and has been refused parole twice since.
In July 2026 he was charged with further historical offences. He has pleaded not guilty and a trial is set for November 2027.

Before the fall: who Paul Gadd was

Gadd never knew his father. He was brought up by his grandmother and his young mother, and at the age of 10 he and his brother were taken into care. That's all laid out in Sky News' timeline of his life, which also tracks the long run of false starts that came before fame. He spent years gigging under other names before he and producer Mike Leander hit on the Gary Glitter character.

It took off in 1972 with Rock and Roll (Parts 1 and 2), which reached number two in the UK and topped the charts in America. A year later he had his first UK number one with I'm the Leader of the Gang (I Am). By 1975 he'd sold 18 million records. Glam rock was the sound of British teenage life at the time, and Glitter sat right alongside Marc Bolan and T. Rex as one of its faces.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxfSlIS55mk&list=RDXxfSlIS55mk&start_radio=1

The money didn't last. He was declared bankrupt towards the end of the 1970s, then clawed his way back in the 1980s as a nostalgia act. His annual Christmas tours were a fixture, and Another Rock and Roll Christmas gave him his last UK top 40 hit in 1984. To a lot of the public, he was harmless panto rock. That image was about to be destroyed completely.

1997: the laptop in Bristol

In November 1997 Glitter took his laptop into a computer shop in Bristol to be repaired. While working on it, a computer engineer found thousands of images of child abuse on the hard drive and called the police. When the case reached court years later, it emerged that around 4,000 images had been recovered.

In November 1999, at Bristol Crown Court, he pleaded guilty to 54 counts of making indecent photographs of children under 16. RTÉ reported at the time that he was jailed for four months and put on the sex offenders register. At the same hearing he was cleared of separate charges of sexually assaulting an underage fan in the 1980s.

Four months for 54 offences looks astonishing now. He was out in about two months, in January 2000, and he didn't hang about. He left Britain almost straight away.

Spain, Cuba and Cambodia

Glitter's first stops after prison were Spain and then Cuba, where he fathered a son in 2001. By 2002 he'd turned up in Cambodia. His presence there didn't stay secret for long, and after children's rights campaigners protested, the Cambodian authorities expelled him amid allegations of sex crimes. He moved on to Thailand and then to Vietnam, settling in the coastal resort of Vung Tau, south east of Ho Chi Minh City.

Vietnam: the arrest at the airport

In 2005 Glitter was renting a house in Vung Tau. Vietnamese police began investigating claims that he'd abused two young girls there, one from Vung Tau itself and one from Can Tho in the Mekong Delta. When the story broke, he tried to get out of the country. On 19 November 2005 police caught him at Ho Chi Minh City airport as he tried to board a flight, ending a week-long manhunt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYDKnd5R1jA

Here's a detail that often gets left out. Vietnamese prosecutors looked at a child rape charge, which could have carried the death penalty, but decided they didn't have enough evidence to bring it. He was charged with committing obscene acts with children instead. While he was on remand, his own lawyer confirmed that Glitter had paid $2,000 each to the girls' families, who then wrote to the court asking for the case to be dropped. The families had originally asked for more. Prosecutors said the payment wouldn't stop the trial, though the court could treat it as compensation when it came to sentencing.

The trial went ahead in March 2006. The girls are described as aged 10 and 11 in most reports, though some outlets at the time gave their ages as 11 and 12. The court found he'd abused them repeatedly at his villa and in local hotels. The judge called his behaviour "disgusting and sick" and jailed him for three years. Glitter insisted he was innocent and claimed he was the victim of a conspiracy.

2008: the man nobody wanted

Glitter was released in August 2008, after a Lunar New Year amnesty knocked three months off. What happened next was close to farce. He was put on a plane to Bangkok with an onward ticket to London, but refused to board the connecting flight, saying he was ill. Thailand wouldn't let him in, so he was sent to Hong Kong, which turned him away as well.

With nowhere left to go, he landed at Heathrow on 22 August 2008. He was met by police and signed the sex offenders register, which meant registering his address within three days and telling police about any trip abroad lasting more than three days. He was placed on the register for life.

Operation Yewtree and the 2015 trial

In October 2012, weeks after ITV's documentary on Jimmy Savile broke open the biggest abuse scandal in British broadcasting history, the Metropolitan Police launched Operation Yewtree. Glitter was the first person arrested under it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNOwr2nB8gs

He was charged in 2014 and went on trial at Southwark Crown Court in January 2015. The prosecution described him as an accomplished liar. He denied everything. In February 2015 the jury found him guilty of one count of attempted rape, four counts of indecent assault and one count of having sex with a girl under 13. He was cleared of some other counts.

There were three victims, all schoolgirls. The youngest was under 10 when he abused her in 1975. The other two, aged 12 and 13, were abused after being invited backstage to his dressing room, and the 12-year-old was then taken to his hotel. On 27 February 2015 Judge Alistair McCreath jailed him for 16 years. He said Glitter had done "real and lasting damage" to all three girls purely for his own gratification, and that he'd seen no real sign that Glitter had atoned. Glitter lost an appeal against the conviction later that year.

His case often gets talked about alongside other music industry figures whose behaviour went unchecked for years, from Phil Spector to the Bill Wyman and Mandy Smith story that the tabloids treated as gossip at the time. Going right back to the 1950s, there's also Jerry Lee Lewis and his 13-year-old bride, which nearly ended his career but somehow didn't.

Released, then recalled within weeks

Under UK sentencing rules Glitter was automatically released on licence at the halfway point. He walked out of HMP The Verne in Portland, Dorset, on 3 February 2023, having served eight years. The Ministry of Justice said his licence conditions were among the strictest it imposes.

Police custody photograph of Gary Glitter, real name Paul Gadd, in later life with white hair, a white goatee and a grey jacket

He lasted barely a month. In March 2023 he was sent back to prison. The Ministry of Justice didn't say exactly which condition he'd broken, but press reports said he'd been caught trying to get onto the dark web using a smartphone. Later coverage of his parole bids reported that police monitoring had also found him viewing downloaded images of children.

A Parole Board panel heard his case in private in January 2024 and refused to release him, finding he posed "a continuing risk of serious harm to the public". A second panel turned him down again in June 2025 after looking at the paperwork. Unless a future panel says otherwise, he'll stay inside until his sentence runs out in February 2031.

The damages case and the bankruptcy

One of his victims took him to the High Court as well. In June 2024 Judge Amanda Tipples ordered him to pay her £508,000 in damages, most of it to cover the earnings she'd lost as a result of the abuse she suffered when she was 12. The final figure came to £508,800, including money for future therapy.

He didn't pay. In March 2025 the County Court at Torquay and Newton Abbot made him bankrupt on her application. Her lawyer told reporters that Glitter had "refused to cooperate with the process".

What about the royalties?

Every time Rock and Roll Part 2 turns up somewhere, the same question follows: is he still being paid? The answer is complicated. When Joker used the track for its famous stairs scene in 2019, a lot of outlets reported that he'd get nothing, because he'd sold the master recordings and his publishing years earlier. The Hollywood Reporter looked harder and pointed out that he could still collect songwriter performance royalties, which are split between publishers and writers, so the reports that he'd get nothing weren't quite right.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fj-_oEixVYs

The song's afterlife in American sport took a hit too. After his conviction in Vietnam the NFL effectively stopped stadiums using it, and in 2012 it moved to stop the New England Patriots playing a cover version as their touchdown anthem.

The new charges in 2026

In July 2026 the Crown Prosecution Service authorised fresh charges against Gadd relating to a girl in the late 1970s and early 1980s. When he appeared by video link from prison at Southwark Crown Court in September 2026, he pleaded not guilty to all eight counts. The charges are four counts of indecent assault, two of indecency with a child and two of unlawful sexual intercourse with a girl under 13. They relate to alleged offences against one girl between 1978 and 1981 at his home in Kensington.

The allegations were first reported to police in January 2025 and he was interviewed that July. A three-week trial is due to start on 22 November 2027, when Gadd will be 83. He denies the charges.