A victim of Gary Glitter is bringing a compensation claim against the former pop star over the psychiatric damage she suffered at his hands, a high court judge has been told.
The woman is suing Glitter, whose real name is Paul Gadd, after he was convicted in 2015 of abusing her and two other young victims between 1975 and 1980.
“What we have is severe and profound consequences as a result of abuse that I think is fair to say is of the worst kind,” her lawyer, Jonathan Metzer, told the court during a hearing in London on Tuesday.
“In summary, it has had profound and long-lasting consequences for my client’s life ever since.”
Metzer said she was seeking damages over the repercussions of the abuse she suffered when she was 12 years old.
Gadd, 79, did not attend the hearing, nor was he represented by a lawyer, with the court told he had not so far engaged with the civil case. The woman, who cannot be identified, previously secured a “default judgment” in her claim – a ruling in her favour over Gadd’s liability.
Mrs Justice Tipples, the judge overseeing the case, is being asked to decide what level of compensation the woman could receive. Metzer, who joined the hearing via video link, said her claim arose out of “serious sexual abuse and assault committed on her by the defendant”.
He said the woman had received “severe psychiatric diagnoses” – including of complex post-traumatic stress disorder – with a clinical psychologist’s report detailing how the abuse had affected her mental health, relationships, education and employment.
The judge adjourned the hearing until 27 March to ensure Gadd received case documents at HMP Risley in Cheshire and to give him the opportunity to respond.
The Parole Board rejected Gadd’s request to be freed from jail in a decision published on 7 February. He was jailed for 16 years in 2015 for sexually abusing the three schoolgirls.
He was automatically released from HMP The Verne, a low-security prison in Portland in Dorset, in February last year after serving half of his fixed-term determinate sentence.
But he was returned to prison less than six weeks later after police monitoring him showed he had breached his licence conditions by reportedly trying to access the dark web and viewing downloaded images of children.
In the late 1990s, Gadd was jailed for possessing thousands of child abuse images. In 2002 he was expelled from Cambodia amid reports of sex crime allegations and, in March 2006, was convicted of sexually abusing two girls aged 10 and 11 in Vietnam and spent two-and-a-half years in jail.
The offences for which he was jailed in 2015 came to light as part of Operation Yewtree, the Metropolitan police investigation launched after the Jimmy Savile scandal.
