Bill Cosby seeks court sanctions, Child sex abuse inquiry: Leo Brittan Westminster, Jehovah’s Witnesses, UN Official who failed to act on child sex abuse allegations resigns

– Bill Cosby seeks court sanctions against accuser over deposition leak
– Child sex abuse inquiry: Leon Brittan among leading Westminster figures named in documents
– Is religion doing enough to root out abuse?
– UN official who failed to act on child sex abuse allegations resigns

Bill Cosby seeks court sanctions against accuser over deposition leak
Reuters By Steve Gorman July 21, 2015

Comedian Bill Cosby filed legal papers on Tuesday calling for court sanctions against a woman accusing him of sexual assault, saying she breached their confidentiality agreement in the leak of his full deposition from a 10-year-old civil case to the New York Times.

Cosby, 78, made the filing in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia in opposition to recent motions by Andrea Constand, a former Temple University employee who has alleged the comedian tricked her into taking drugs before he sexually assaulted her.

The lawsuit she brought against Cosby was settled for an undisclosed sum in 2006, and all documents from the litigation were sealed until a federal judge on July 6 released limited redacted excerpts from Cosby’s 2005 deposition testimony in the case.

Those excerpts included Cosby’s admission under oath that he had obtained Quaaludes, the brand name for a sedative widely abused as a recreational drug in the 1970s, with the intent of giving the pills to young women in order to have sex with them.

On July 8, Constand filed papers in court seeking to unseal the entire deposition and her settlement agreement with Cosby, as well as to free her from any confidentiality restrictions.

The New York Times has since obtained its own record of Cosby’s deposition and posted additional excerpts on its website, revealing testimony in which the entertainer described how he had pursued women and how he obtained Quaaludes.

Cosby’s own court filing on Tuesday stressed that the deposition excerpts so far unsealed by the judge contain no testimony that he engaged in any non-consensual sex or gave anyone Quaaludes without their knowledge or consent….
http://news.yahoo.com/bill-cosby-seeks-court-sanctions-against-accuser-over-015512488.html

Child sex abuse inquiry: Leon Brittan among leading Westminster figures named in documents
22 July 2015 By Jack Blanchard
THE former Tory Home Secretary’s name is on government file along with other powerful Westminster officials from the 1970s and 80s including Sir Peter Morrison.

LEADING Westminster figures from the 1970s and 80s including the late Leon Brittan have been named in Government child abuse documents, it was reported last night.

Sky News said that after months of requests Whitehall has finally revealed that papers do exist relating to Margaret Thatcher’s former parliamentary secretary the late Sir Peter Morrison, former Home Secretary Sir Leon, former diplomat the late Sir Peter Hayman and former minister the late Sir William van Straubenzee.

It came after the Government released the details in January of a file prepared for Mrs Thatcher’s office on the ‘unnatural sexual’ behaviour of one of the men Sir Peter Hayman.

The new batch of file names reveal there were further Government papers relating to the former MI6 man and career diplomat.

The content of the papers have not been revealed, however.

Sky News said the documents have been shared with the police and will be passed to the Child Abuse Inquiry led by Justice Lowell Goddard….
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/child-sex-abuse-inquiry-leon-6119976

Is religion doing enough to root out abuse?
Caroline Wyatt Religious affairs correspondent 22 July 2015

Karen Morgan said the church offered no help when she reported the abuse

From when Karen Morgan was 12, until she was well into her teens, she was sexually abused by her uncle – a ministerial servant with the Jehovah’s Witnesses….

But what is striking about the Jehovah’s Witnesses is their explicit policy of dealing with abuse in-house.

Because of their practice of following the Bible literally, they insist there must be two witnesses to a crime, often not the case in child abuse cases.

However, in Karen’s case a second witness did come forward: Wendy, a family friend and fellow member of the Barry congregation in south Wales. She had been raped by the same man.

When she reported the crime to elders, Wendy was made to describe it in minute detail to a group of older men.

Later, she had to give her account again in the same room as Sewell….

Afterwards, the elders told her that as it was only her account against that of Sewell, nothing more could be done.

This bringing together of the accused and the accuser in a “judicial committee” is a common feature of Jehovah’s Witnesses’ justice.

Karen, still a teenager at the time, was put through the process.
Reluctance to co-operate

The elders also ruled that their separate accusations didn’t constitute the required two witnesses.

Despite a pattern of predatory sexual behaviour, it took more than two decades to bring Wendy and Karen’s abuser to justice.

He is now serving a 14-year prison sentence.

His punishment from the Jehovah’s Witnesses? There wasn’t one.

Even when the case came to court, the organisation was reluctant to co-operate….

In a programme for Radio 4’s The Report, we have identified this lack of co-operation in several other similar cases.

Confidential documents from the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of Britain – the official name for the Jehovah’s Witnesses – that we have seen are explicit about the best way to deal with such matters being within the congregation….
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-33609927

UN official who failed to act on child sex abuse allegations resigns
July 22, 2015 Associated Press

UNITED NATIONS –  The U.N. rights official who admitted not following up for months on allegations of child sexual abuse by French soldiers in Central African Republic has resigned.

The U.N. confirmed Wednesday that Flavia Pansieri has left the post of deputy high commissioner for human rights “for health reasons.” No more details were given.

The allegations by several children as young as 9 of trading oral sex and sodomy for food with French soldiers tasked with protecting civilians in the violence-torn country didn’t become public until late April, almost a year after U.N. staffers first heard the children’s stories. Pansieri’s comments and other leaked documents led the U.N. secretary-general this summer to order an investigation into how the U.N. handled the case.

In a confidential statement for a separate internal investigation, obtained by The Associated Press, Pansieri said she had been distracted from the case by other issues, including budget cuts for several months. “I regret to say that in the context of those very hectic days, I failed to follow up on the CAR situation,” Pansieri said in the statement dated March 26.

She said she and her boss, high commissioner Zeid Raad al-Hussein, had assumed French authorities were handling the allegations, even as France pressed the U.N. for months for more information….
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2015/07/22/un-official-who-failed-to-act-on-child-sex-abuse-allegations-resigns/

How Thatcher’s Government Covered Up a VIP Pedophile Ring, Leon Brittan and the Westminster child abuse scandal: ‘his fingerprints were over everything’, Raids on 4 homes in MP child sex ring scandal

Leon Brittan and the Westminster child abuse scandal: ‘his fingerprints were over everything’
Tomas Hirst Mar. 6, 2015
Don Hale, former editor of the Bury Messenger, has alleged that former Home Secretary Leon Brittan was actively involved in a cover up of child abuse by a paedophile ring including prominent Westminster MPs.

In an interview with the Daily Beast Hale alleges that a dossier on the abuse handed to him by Labour peer and then Cabinet Minister Barbara Castle, and later seized by Special Branch officers, was suppressed by Brittan. He says the then Home Secretary “was mentioned in everything you picked up, his fingerprints were over everything, he was the instigator”.

Brittan passed away in January following a long battle with cancer. Over the past few years he had faced growing questions over what he knew about allegations that a network of paedophiles had operated in Westminster during the 1980s.

He admitted receiving a file from Geoffrey Dickens, then a Conservative MP, regarding the allegations but insisted that he had acted properly in passing the documents over to officials for examination. A review in 2013 supported his claims.

However, Hale’s allegations put the spotlight back on Westminster as the scandal continues to gather pace. Days after Brittan’s death, Labour MP Tom Watson who has been pivotal in bringing the case back into the public domain said he spoke to several people who allege they were raped by the late politician. One male victim was a child when he was allegedly raped by Brittan….

Liz Davies, a former social worker who was employed in Islington during the 1980s, told the Daily Beast that she had collected evidence suggesting that as many as 61 boys had been victims of a network of sexual predators “that stretched from Westminster to Northern Ireland, Wales, and the island of Jersey in the Channel”….
http://www.businessinsider.com/westminster-child-abuse-scandal-and-leon-brittan-2015-3

How Thatcher’s Government Covered Up a VIP Pedophile Ring
Now that most of the major figures are dead, the truth is emerging about the systematic sexual abuse of children by members of the British government. 03.06.15  Nico Hines

LONDON — A newspaper editor was handed startling evidence that Britain’s top law enforcement official knew there was a VIP pedophile network in Westminster, at the heart of the British government. What happened next in the summer of 1984 helps to explain how shocking allegations of rape and murder against some of the country’s most powerful men went unchecked for decades.

Less than 24 hours after starting to inquire about the dossier presented to him by a senior Labour Party politician, the editor was confronted in his office by a furious member of parliament who threatened him and demanded the documents. “He was frothing at the mouth and really shouting and spitting in my face,” Don Hale told The Daily Beast. “He was straight at me like a raging lion; he was ready to knock me through the wall.”

Despite the MP’s explosive intervention, Hale refused to hand over the papers which appeared to show that Leon Brittan, Margaret Thatcher’s Home Secretary, was fully aware of a pedophile network that included top politicians.

The editor’s resistance was futile; the following morning, police officers from the counter-terror and intelligence unit known as Special Branch burst into the newspaper office, seized the material and threatened to have Hale arrested if he ever reported what had been found.

More than 30 years later, an inquiry into allegations of child sex abuse rings, murder, and cover-ups has been launched by the British government after Scotland Yard detectives said they believed statements by victims who claimed they were systematically abused as young boys at sex abuse parties attended by judges, politicians, intelligence officers, and staff at the royal palaces.

In 1983, a controversial MP, Geoffrey Dickens, had made a series of incendiary claims about active pedophiles in the corridors of power. He handed a file containing the names of alleged perpetrators to Leon Brittan; publicly the authorities shrugged off the claims and no trial or prosecution would follow. The dossier mysteriously disappeared….

Baroness Castle, then Barbara Castle, a Labour member of the European parliament, told Hale she did not trust Brittan to investigate the allegations thoroughly….

Worried about the integrity of the Home Office investigation, Castle had tried to interest the major newspapers in the classified documents but she turned to Hale when they rejected her overtures. “She was saying, ‘I’ve been everywhere else, I’ve been to the nationals, nobody would touch it with a barge pole, but what do you think?’” Hale recalled. “As a journalist of course I was interested.”

Great Britain’s notoriously tough libel laws insured that obviously he couldn’t repeat the allegations included in the Home Office papers that about 16 MPs and members of the House of Lords, and 30 high-profile figures from the Church of England, private schools, and big business, were members of, and advocates for, the Paedophile Information Exchange. The shadowy group, which operated partly in the open, campaigned for the age of consent to be abolished and incest to be legalized. It also allowed pedophiles to send each other secure mail and to meet in person….

There is growing evidence that MI5 and MI6, Britain’s security services, took a similar view. MI5 is alleged to have repeatedly blocked investigations into a sex abuse ring at the Kincora children’s home in Northern Ireland in order to protect its intelligence-gathering operation.

The longtime deputy director of MI6, and former High Commissioner in Canada, Peter Hayman was himself allegedly a pedophile, and was ultimately named as such in parliament by Geoffrey Dickens. Hayman had been caught with explicit material in 1978 but no charge was brought. Secret files discovered at the National Archives this year revealed that the attorney general at the time believed it wasn’t in the public interest for Hayman to be prosecuted. Prime Minister Thatcher ordered his depravity to be concealed from the public….
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/06/britain-s-horrific-vip-pedophile-cover-up.html

Raids on 4 homes in MP child sex ring scandal
Ollie McAteer for Metro.co.uk Sunday 8 Mar 2015

Police have searched two homes belonging to the late Lord Brittan as part of an investigation into allegations of child sex abuse.

In a highly secretive exercise, detectives from the Met’s Operation Midland raided houses in Pimlico, Westminster, and in Wensleydale, North Yorkshire, which belonged to the former home secretary….

Leon Brittan was home secretary, and later trade secretary, under Margaret Thatcher. He died at his Pimlico home in January, aged 75….
http://metro.co.uk/2015/03/08/raids-on-4-homes-in-mp-child-sex-ring-scandal-5094175/

Former British Home Secretary Leon Brittan Death and Child Abuse Allegations, Gary Glitter trial and child abuse images

New Allegations Of Child Abuse Emerge After Former British Home Secretary Leon Brittan’s Death  Dina Spector Jan. 26, 2015

Leon Brittan’s death last week has reignited claims that the former home secretary was involved in the cover-up of a secret Westminster paedophile ring that operated in the 1970s and 1980s.

Days after Brittan’s death, Labour MP Tom Watson said he spoke to several people who allege they were raped by the late politician. One male victim was a child when he was allegedly raped by Brittan.

“Many have urged me over the past two years to reveal allegations against Brittan using parliamentary privilege,” Watson told the Mirror. “This allows MPs to say things that are not subject to libel laws. Some will ask why I’ve waited until his death to speak out. The reason is simple. I didn’t want to prejudice any jury trial he might one day face.”

Brittan’s death also underlines how slowly and ineffectually the British police are moving in their investigation of the Westminster child-abuse ring. The prime suspects are literally dying. Former MP Cyril Smith — another accused child abuser — died in 2010. Peter Hayman, the former deputy director of MI6 who was convicted of gross indecency, died in 1992….

Brittan remains the subject of an investigation into the disappearance of a 40-page dossier naming eight senior civil servants and politicians who were allegedly involved in a secret paedophile ring.

In 1983, Brittan was handed a dossier written by conservative MP Geoffrey Dickens while serving as home secretary in Margaret Thatcher’s government. Dickens died in 1995. In July last year, Brittan was surrounded by allegations that he failed to properly investigate the claims. Brittan maintained that he handled the documents correctly.

Last year, he told the Daily Mail that he gave the names to the Director of Public Prosecutions…. http://www.businessinsider.com/leon-brittan-death-and-child-abuse-allegations-2015-1

Gary Glitter breaks down in tears over child abuse images  28 January 2015

Gary Glitter broke down in tears as he explained to jurors why he had been in possession of child abuse images.

Sobbing uncontrollably, the 70-year-old said he had been in a bad place in his life, and was struggling financially, with alcohol and with drugs.

He issued a tearful apology to his fans, saying: “I lost my own dignity, and I am so sorry. I am very sorry.”

Glitter, on trial under his real name Paul Gadd, denies 10 charges relating to three girls between 1975 and 1980.

In November 1997, when he went to pick up a Toshiba laptop he had handed to a PC World branch in Bristol, he was arrested, Southwark Crown Court in London heard.

The engineer who examined the machine had discovered images on it related to child abuse.

Mr Gadd subsequently admitted responsibility for a “large number” of images – depicting a full range of sexual activity taking place between men and very young children – being on his computer.

He was jailed for four months in 1999 for the collection of 4,000 images….

I did not try to rape her or any other child.”….

He is also charged with four counts of indecent assault on a fan in 1977 at hotels in Leicester and Birmingham when she was aged 12 and 13; plying the same girl with alcohol, and having unlawful sexual intercourse with her.

Two further charges allege he indecently assaulted a girl of 13 on a date between October 1979 and December 1980, in his dressing room at a venue in Watford where he was performing. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-31015347