LONDON — The Crown Prosecution Service did not wait for Gary Glitter to finish his sentence. On Thursday, while the 82-year-old former pop star sat inside an English prison already serving 16 years for abusing three schoolgirls in the 1970s, prosecutors charged him with four additional historical sex offenses against a girl under 14 – allegations spanning a three-year period that ended more than four decades ago.
The four charges concern “a period of alleged abuse that took place between 1978 and 1981,” according to Bethan David, a Deputy Chief Crown Prosecutor. They include one count of unlawful sexual intercourse with a girl under 13, and three counts of indecent assault on a girl under 14, NBC News reported. The case is to be heard at Southwark Crown Court in London. No trial date has been set. The complainant is protected from identification by law.
Whether Gadd – the man who recorded and performed as Gary Glitter – intends to contest the new counts has not been made public. At 82, he is among the oldest defendants in an active British criminal proceeding involving historical sex offenses. The Crown Prosecution Service’s decision to bring charges against someone already in prison on a long sentence is consistent with the position the service has maintained since Operation Yewtree established that existing convictions would not preclude prosecution of newly disclosed allegations.
His criminal record began accumulating in 1999, when he pleaded guilty in the United Kingdom to possessing child pornography, a case that ended his commercial career and prompted him to leave the country. In 2006, a Vietnamese court convicted him of committing obscene acts with two girls aged 10 and 11, and sentenced him to four years in prison. He was expelled from Vietnam upon completing his sentence. He was later expelled from Cambodia as well, after attempting to settle there.
He returned to the United Kingdom. In 2015, a jury convicted him of sexually abusing three schoolgirls between 1975 and 1980 – a period in the heart of his fame – and sentenced him to 16 years in prison. He was released on license in 2023 and recalled to custody within weeks after breaching the conditions his parole board had set. He has been imprisoned since.
The man born Paul Francis Gadd in 1944, in Banbury, Oxfordshire, built a career as a glam-rock act through the early 1970s. His stage persona – the platform boots, the silver jumpsuits, the audience-participation mechanics of “Rock and Roll Part 2” – became a fixture of a decade that treated spectacle as its primary virtue. That 1972 track proved to have a lifespan considerably longer than the career it launched: it became one of the most-played crowd anthems in sports stadiums around the world, with American venues maintaining it through successive convictions well into the 2000s. The song’s presence in arenas diminished gradually and then, after the 2015 conviction, decisively.
The new charges add a complainant not previously part of his public legal record. The four counts span the late 1970s and early 1980s, years when Glitter’s career had already passed its commercial peak but before his first conviction had been recorded. The Crown Prosecution Service’s willingness to charge someone in his eighties, already in prison, reflects the posture British prosecutors adopted after Operation Yewtree – the Metropolitan Police investigation launched in 2012 following revelations about the broadcaster Jimmy Savile – built a new standard for how historical allegations against public figures would be handled. That standard has since produced prosecutions reaching back to the 1960s, touching entertainers, television broadcasters, and public figures across generations.
The entertainment world has been absorbing its own relationship with the 1970s this week. Clive Davis, the music executive who discovered Whitney Houston and whose Arista Records helped define the pop landscape of that decade, was mourned at a funeral service in Manhattan on Sunday, where his artists gathered to pay tribute to what he had built. The two figures occupied the same musical moment; they did not occupy the same moral universe.
What the Crown Prosecution Service has not announced: the timeline for bringing the new charges to trial while Gadd remains incarcerated, the mechanism by which any resulting sentence might run relative to his existing 16 years, or whether his age or health will affect how quickly the case proceeds. His defense position has not been disclosed. The complainant, protected from identification by law, has not spoken publicly. The charges exist, filed and formal. What happens next is for the court.
