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Blue Peter Leslie: I don't even know the person in rape claim
Kiran Randhawa24 Jun 2008
John Leslie today lashed out at the new rape allegations against him claiming they are "untrue".
The former Blue Peter presenter, 43, spoke publicly in London to protest his innocence over accusations he attacked a woman in 1995.
He said: "I am accused of attacking a person 13 years ago, I don't even know who this person is. I certainly did not attack this person as I have not attacked anyone. The accusation is not true."
Leslie said he was angry and bitter at facing another set of allegations after he was cleared of sexual assault five years ago.
"It was open season in 2003. I was subjected to an eight-month police inquiry. I was pilloried in the press," he said. "My mother and father are beside themselves with worry.
"If I sound bitter it is because I am," he added. "There is little justice and no fairness in what my family have been through.
"I ask when is this nightmare going to end," he said. "Regrettably as has happened in the past, details of a private police inquiry have been leaked to the media and once again I face trial by media."
Leslie was questioned by detectives for three hours at Teddington police station yesterday over claims by a woman that he raped her at his East Sheen home in 1995. The woman made the allegation last September. Just before he went in to the police station to be questioned, Leslie said to a friend: "Here we go again." Detectives took his fingerprints and a DNA swab. Leslie was bailed to report back to police in August.
In August 2003, he was acquitted on two counts of sexual assault. A 23-year-old actress came forward after Ulrika Jonsson claimed in a book that she had been indecently assaulted by an unnamed TV presenter.
Prosecutors dropped the case against him, refusing to give a reason other than to say that the actress who made the complaint had come forward with "new information".
The judge told Leslie that he left court "without a stain on his character". No action was taken on claims by two other women, a weathergirl and a showbusiness agent. But Leslie's TV career was already in ruins. In 2002, Granada first suspended him and then sacked him as a £200,000-a-year presenter of This Morning after photographs of him snorting cocaine were published.
Then a video was posted on the internet of a drug-fuelled, three-in-a-bed sex session involving Leslie and his then girlfriend, ex-nurse Abi Titmuss.
Former American basketball player Jayson Blayde produced photographs and a video of Titmuss taking part in what the tabloids described as a "sex orgy" with Leslie and Blayde's girlfriend. The following week Titmuss sold her sex confessions to a Sunday paper.
Most damaging of all, she confessed to buying cocaine worth £100 with Blayde on their way to Leslie's house.
Since then Leslie has set himself up as a property developer in Edinburgh. Police admit that the latest accusation against him will be hard to investigate because of the time that has elapsed since the alleged incident.
It was another allegation from the past which first placed Leslie under the spotlight.
In 2002, he was enjoying a successful career co-hosting This Morning with Fern Britton when Jonsson published her autobiography, Honest, in which she said she had been raped in a hotel room 15 years earlier when she was working as a weathergirl for TV-am. She did not name her attacker but said he was a well-known TV presenter.
Leslie was named, apparently by mistake, by TV presenter Matthew Wright on his Channel Five show. Although Jonsson has never spoken about the naming of Leslie, once the accusation became public a number of other women came forward to make claims about his sexual behaviour.
After he was cleared, Leslie said outside Southwark crown court that he had been to "hell and back" and that he had maintained his innocence throughout.
It is not known if the new allegation has been made by a woman linked to the previous police investigation or if it is an entirely new inquiry. Jonsson is not the woman making the allegation.
