One of paedophile Gary Glitter’s youngest victims has broken her 10-year silence to speak for the first time as an adult of her appalling ordeal at the fallen idol’s hands.
In a harrowing insight into the lifelong effects of the shamed glam rocker’s catalogue of sickening attacks, ‘N’ – who was just 11 when pervert Glitter stole her childhood – told how she still suffers frightening flashbacks of the abuse that turned her into a virtual recluse.
A shadow of the bubbly, precocious teenager Glitter snared, the girl, who MailOnline is not identifying, now suffers from dark spells of depression and rarely goes out, haunted by her life-changing nightmare.
Speaking exclusively to MailOnline, N, now 21, bravely admitted: ‘I cry out in my sleep almost every night. I dream that it (the abuse by Glitter) is happening again. I have nightmares about it all of the time and I need to take pills to sleep.’
She was one of two young girls predator Glitter was convicted of abusing when he lived in the seaside resort of Vung Tau in Vietnam in 2006.
The girl told police how he had lured her to his beach house where he showed her vile films of adults raping children on his laptop.
She was tricked into going to his house by Glitter’s then 19-year-old lover ‘B’, a homeless orphan, who became his child-sex ‘Pied Piper’ sex recruiter for him. B would procure young girls for the star, it was stated in prosecution Statement of Facts bundle read in court.
Glitter, now 70, real name Paul Francis Gadd, had sex or sexual activity with N three times in September and October 2005. He arrogantly paid her £9 after each time.
He also raped N’s friend ‘D’, who was ‘sold’ to him by her aunt for £28 when she was just 10, an official police report into the investigation stated.
The prosecution dossier told how a prostitute called ‘O’, who Glitter was seeing, brought her niece D to stay with him – and twice sold her to him for sex.
When he raped D, O watched on both occasions, the prosecution papers said. The three of them then slept naked together afterwards on the bed, the court was told.
Disgraced Glitter was facing child rape charges at the time of his arrest – which could have resulted in the death penalty and put him before a firing squad.
But he wriggled out of it after paying the families of his two victims just £1,300 in compensation each to earn him a more lenient sentence on other charges of child abuse. In theend he served just three years in jail in Vietnam.
Looking back both victims’ families say they felt tricked and pressured by police and lawyers into agreeing to the deal and regretted accepting the money.
In 2008 Glitter was deported back to the UK after serving two years of his sentence.
In 2012 he became the first person to be arrested in the Met’s Operation Yewtree, the celebrity child abuse probe launch in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal.
And in January the fallen idol was told he will probably die in prison when he was jailed for 16 years at London’s Southwark Crown Court for abusing three young girls between 1975 and 1980 – in chilling echoes of N’s case.
Back in Vietnam, a decade after his abuse, however, it is clear that N is still tormented and deeply troubled by her ordeal.
Painfully thin, she weighs just 46kg despite being nearly 1.7 metres tall and spends most of her day locked up alone in her bedroom, according to her mother.
She only agreed to meet with me and my Vietnamese translator on the condition of remaining anonymous because she remembered us from a number of meetings we had with between the time of Glitter’s arrest and his deportation to the UK.
Squatting on the floor of her parents’ single-storey home just a mile from the seaside villa where Glitter molested her, she said sadly: ‘When I think about what happened to me I feel I don’t want to eat.
‘I want to lock myself away. There are unhappy things in my mind. I don’t know how to explain it.
‘The girls I grew up with have boyfriends and husbands. They laugh at me when they see me. My life is very dark. I can’t be like them.
‘Sometimes I can’t think what I want because everything seems dark. I can’t see anything.’
N – who has received no counselling to help her come to terms with the abuse she was subjected to – feels stigmatised by her ordeal as says her neighbours and former school friends all know about her connection to Glitter.
‘I’ve never had a boyfriend,’ she revealed. ‘No one will love me when they know what happened to me. I feel shame. I won’t meet anyone now. It’s better to be alone than to meet someone and then have them find out what happened to me.
‘I stay at home because if I go out someone will recognise me and I will have to relive it all over again.’
The girl’s 54-year-old mother wrung her hands anxiously as she told us: ‘My daughter yells out in her sleep all the time. Sometimes she shouts out ‘My God – not again’.
‘I am very worried about her. I ask her every day why don’t you eat? Why don’t you go somewhere?
‘She used to go to the beach as a young girl. She used to love to swim. But she never goes anymore. She only stays at home with me or locks herself away in her room.
‘I try to talk to her a lot because I am worried she has a problem in her mind. Should I take her to a doctor? I don’t know what to do. She doesn’t talk to her brother or sister. She is a different person.’
Told about the new prison sentence given to Glitter in London this year, N’s mother was distinctly unimpressed. ‘Only 16 years?’ she said. ‘That man should be put behind bars forever. He has destroyed my daughter’s life.’
