THE MEME doing the rounds on MySpace read: 'On a scale of one to Jimmy Beloved how into 13-year-olds are you?'
It was the mid-2000s, a time when social media was in its infancy, teenagers carried around Hiptop Slide phones and the genres of emo and screamo music were building an army of followers. And in Newcastle, the band Falling for Beloved had burst onto the scene, playing all-age gigs at The Palais, The Loft and other venues, including church halls and pubs.
Later, under the name We Built Atlantis, the post-hardcore/pop-punk/electronica band would enjoy more success, playing Groovin the Moo, releasing an EP and touring the east coast of Australia.
But that would come later. This was the mid-2000s, the band were in their early 20s and their audience, it seems, was predominantly teenagers, those who identified as outcasts and struggled to fit in or be accepted in the mainstream.
Jimmy Beloved, the guy from the meme, real name Daniel Hanson, was their lead singer, and for the better part of the next decade he would use his status as a musician to meet, manipulate, groom and then rape 14 girls, some as young as 12.
To understand how this was able to happen, how Hanson was able to operate as an unchecked sex offender for so long, it is important to first understand that music scene in Newcastle at that time.
The Newcastle Herald has spoken to six of those women about the impact of Hanson's many crimes, the message to other survivors of sexual assault and a seemingly unregulated underage music scene that not only left vulnerable girls unprotected but made it nearly impossible for them to speak up.
The women say they came into the music scene as children looking for "innocent adoration" and there was no thought of sex, until they were forced.
But they had entered a world where "slut shaming" and "revenge porn" was rife, they say. Where it was common for older boys, even men, to date girls much younger than them and where sexual deviancy was normalised. Where it was joked about, made into early internet memes.
"It was such common knowledge within that scene that [Hanson] preyed on girls that it became a joke," one woman, AC, told the Herald. "It was literally a joke. So I know that is why I had this massive fear of retribution because the message from the scene was: 'women were sluts, they asked for this stuff'. That created an environment where it made it almost impossible to stand up."
The power imbalance between musician and teenage fan was well established, the women say, and as young girls they did not speak up for fear of retaliation and being ostracised from the scene.
"It was accepted within that scene that those musicians, some of them, would prey on young girls," Hanson's ex-partner, LC, says. "And they would use their status to get what they wanted. And as a child you are thinking more of your reputation and what people are going to say. So it is the fear that you're already an outcast and then you're going to be outcast again within a group that you thought you could relate to."
And the women say looking back not only were they outmatched, young and naive against a much older man, but no one at the venues was looking out for them.
"There was no one there regulating, no one keeping an eye out," another woman, Maddie, says. "It was all people our age. You would go up to the door to get into the gig, to get the stamp on your hand and it would be one of your mates who was the same age as you. There was no one older who was regulating, there was never much security, never much presence of anybody who was older who was really looking out for us kids."
It was a predator's playground, as one survivor put it, and Hanson was a skilled and manipulative predator.
He would typically approach underage girls at his gigs, ask for their phone number, tell them they were "the most beautiful girl in the room" and then begin a text message exchange that gradually became more graphic and sexual in nature. He would lie about his age, always telling the girls he was also underage or years younger than he actually was. In reality, from the time he was about 18 until he was 24, Hanson "showed a sexual interest in young women under the age of 16", according to court documents and interviews with the women.
At one stage, when Hanson was 22, he repeatedly sexually assaulted a 12-year-old girl. After lying about his age, Hanson would shower the girls with compliments and then organise their bus and train routes so they could meet him in parks or stormwater drains near his house. They would talk about music, the lyrics to his songs and then Hanson would sexually and indecently assault them, always telling them not to tell anyone about "their little secret".
For some girls he had a code; the word "bestie". "Being a 'bestie' was a term for doing sexual things in exchange for his friendship," one girl said. "Still to this day when I hear the word 'bestie' it makes me feel sick."
On at least one occasion Hanson urged a young girl to skip school to come and see him, while another girl who wanted to interview Hanson for a school project about the band was instead sexually assaulted.
If the girls didn't comply with his sexual requests or displeased him, he would make them walk home or cut off contact. Between 2005 and 2014 Hanson sexually and indecently assaulted 14 girls aged between 12 and 22.
A dozen of the girls he raped and assaulted were aged between 12 and 15, while Hanson was aged between 18 and 24.
He ultimately pleaded guilty to 23 counts of sexual and indecent assault and last year was jailed for a maximum of 28 years, with a non-parole period of 21 years. He will be eligible for parole after he turns 53.
ABUSE STARTED WITH BRAZEN 'RELATIONSHIP'
The story of Hanson's relentless reign of sexual abuse probably starts in 2005, when as an 18-year-old he met a 12-year-old girl, AW.
Hanson, of course, lied about his age and said he was 15 and began a routine of sexual abuse, so persistent that it qualified for a charge that can carry life imprisonment.
AW said all the sexual acts occurred at her house and Hanson was brazen, speaking to her family and almost openly having a "relationship" with a 12-year-old girl.
"He'd have a conversation with my mum, he'd kick the soccer ball with my brother," AW says looking back. "He didn't fit the mould of the stereotypical paedophile."
AW tells a story about hearing of Hanson's arrest in 2019 and laughing, her abuse so insidious that it did not sink in until later that what had happened to her as a 12-year-old in 2005 was sexual abuse.
"I didn't really realise at the time that what was happening was wrong," AW says. "And he said to keep everything a secret and, you know, you feel special, you listen to him, you keep everything a secret. Like, I didn't even realise that I was a victim. I hadn't put that label on myself until I saw that he'd been arrested. So, yeah, a hundred per cent I went through it alone because I didn't even realise it was wrong at the time."
And she says it is only with the benefit of hindsight that she now realises her life took a completely different path after she met Hanson.
"I think it definitely changed my life," she says. "I moved out of home at 16 to live with my boyfriend, didn't finish high school, didn't manage to go to uni. Looking back, just realising how this one thing has affected my life so much." There is debate among those who knew Hanson about what came first - the music or the sexual interest in children.
AW knew Hanson before he started a band and says she can attest that for him being a sexual predator came before being a musician and not the other way around.
But it appears after he joined a band and gained some small level of fame, his sexual deviancy escalated.
'HE RAPED ME IN MY SCHOOL UNIFORM'
AC was 14 when she attended a performance by Falling for Beloved. Hanson asked for her mobile number and later sent her messages saying "you were the most beautiful girl in the room" and "you have intoxicating eyes". AC told him she was 14, Hanson said he was 17, when he was actually 20.
In 2007, they arranged to meet on a school day and he took her to a stormwater drain at Jesmond where he sexually assaulted her. "He raped me in my school uniform," AC would later say in her victim impact statement.
Afterwards, Hanson sent a message saying "no one needs to know about today" and said he was having trouble finding a place to stay. He eventually manoeuvred his way into AC's life and her home, living with her family and sexually assaulting her two or three times a week for three months.
"I was systematically groomed," AC says now. "He was incessant. But I was somebody who was never acknowledged in public. That was for his partner. I was abused in private and dismissed in public. He would dedicate songs to his girlfriend and I would be there on the side, 14 years old, knowing that at least one of those songs was written about me. And if you listen to the lyrics they are pretty damning. The first line of the song is 'Take a look around kid, this is what you killed to view'. That song is about control. It is about how he controlled me. How he was the puppet master."
AC says Hanson would pretend to her family that they had a brother-sister relationship.
"That confused me greatly," she says. "I had to pretend like someone was a family member around other people and then be a toy. And how did that change me? I didn't know who I was at a time when that's when you're starting to develop your sense of identity and who you are."
After an argument, Hanson left the house and told AC he was going to spend more time with another girl.
"What he did was cyclical," AC says. "He would say he was homeless, that he had nowhere to live. He would elicit emotional responses from girls and the younger the better, the easier to control. And he would use very careful, subtle grooming and gaslighting. So small you didn't even notice until it was too late. And when he left me, I thought that meant something was wrong with me. He actually made me misjudge my own memory. He told me: 'I never loved you, you were like a sister to me'. And he continued that narrative. It was like a psychosis because every memory of mine was questioned and I had to battle to convince myself that what I remember was true. And that also feeds into the narrative of was I actually abused or was I just broken and was I treated the way that I deserved. That's a really tough narrative to break."
AC dropped out of school, withdrew from friends and made an attempt on her life.
She says she can remember being in a secure children's psychiatric facility and Hanson, her abuser, coming to visit, the contact facilitated by hospital staff because of the "brother-sister narrative".
She says the fact Hanson was still able to exact control on her in a situation like that, combined with the attitude of the music scene, prolonged her silence. AC went to the police when she was 15, a few months after Hanson cut her out of his life.
"I had this crippling fear of retaliation at that point," AC says. "It is important to mention the scene and what it consisted of; this was when revenge porn was raging. It was just well known that some men in bands that were 17, 18, 19 were going after younger girls who were 13, 14, 15. It was normalised deviancy. I was growing up in that and as a child you think that is normal. So knowing that and then going to the police station, I didn't say anything because I had this intense fear of retaliation from that scene."
That was 2007 and AC says she has a lot of guilt for not going through with making a statement to police at that time. It was not until 2019 that her statement was revisited and Hanson was arrested when "four other voices helped me speak", she says.
"My first thought was how many more people could have been prevented from suffering if I had said something," AC says. "That is an ongoing battle."
AC said the young women who were abused had fallen for the music scene first and had gone into that world looking for "innocent adoration" and nothing sexual.
"He was just a byproduct," AC says. "That music was our outlet, it was a release. And that feeling of being an outcast, not being accepted into society as a whole, having experienced bullying, you had that sense of fitting in or belonging. But then it was just a predator's playground."
CHASING JUSTICE, ACCOUNTABILITY
JW was 15 in 2008 and met Hanson, like so many others, when he introduced himself after a Falling for Beloved gig.
He was 22, and after a month of contact Hanson began texting her explicit images. When she turned 16, JW decided to do a school project on the band and arranged to meet Hanson in Jesmond to interview him about her assignment.
He took her to a secluded park and as JW tried to discuss her project, he groped her and sexually assaulted her. She was not expecting any sexual contact and did not consent. Afterwards they left the park and she went home. They had not discussed the project as planned. She never saw him again and stopped going to gigs. JW was the first to make a complaint to police in 2019.
JW says she had a feeling at the time of Hanson's arrest that there were other victims.
The first media release that police issued referred to only a handful of victims and 10 charges. By 2020, that had ballooned to 14 victims and more than 100 charges as more women came forward to make a complaint against the former musician.
JW says it was scary that Hanson performed at all-age venues and Groovin The Moo, and unbelievable that there was no one really overseeing the gigs and he was able to use his status to prey on young girls.
"Back then he would approach you and start talking to you or come over and give you a hug in between sets and then he'd go off and play music," JW says. "And you were just so infatuated with the fact that he'd come to talk to you. It's like he had a different personality for each person and groomed everyone from a different perspective. He would find a way to connect with you and manipulate you and drag you into his spider web. He had this charismatic energy at that point and I suppose we were at that impressionable age. But now you look at him and it gives you shivers down your spine."
JW says her abuse took its toll and she had been admitted to hospital countless times, while being diagnosed with a number of complex mental health issues. And she says Hanson took away her adolescence and early adulthood by "confining her mind to a constant nightmare".
"I feel like a lot of my life has been caged inside my own head, not being able to escape from the abuse I endured," she says.
She says the message she wanted to focus on was that it is not easy to speak to the police about suffering sexual abuse but there is support available and it would be worth it in the long run.
"There is a lot of focus in the media around the criminal justice system and its broken reality of reporting sexual violence," she says. "It is important to know as victim-survivors we are not people to be hung out to dry. We are people chasing for justice and accountability for the violence we experienced." JW's victim impact statement last year was incredibly powerful.
"None of what you did defines who I am," she said. "I finally found my voice. I will not be known as a victim of your abuse, but someone who put a stop to it."
LIKE BEING DRAGGED INTO A 'SPIDER WEB'
It was 2011 and AN was 14 when she watched a performance of a new band, We Built Atlantis, at Newcastle youth venue The Loft.
The band was formerly known as Falling for Beloved and the lead singer was Daniel Hanson, now 24 and styling himself as Jimmy Atlantis. After the gig Hanson approached AN, asked for her number and they began communicating by phone and Facebook.
He complimented her on her looks and after about four months of contact, they arranged to meet in person.
AN caught public transport from the Central Coast to Newcastle and met up with Hanson.
She was not expecting any sort of sexual contact and was not asked to consent, but Hanson kissed her and forced her to perform oral sex on him before he sexually assaulted her.
She slept on a mattress on the floor and the next morning Hanson walked her to the bus stop. A few months later, he stopped responding to her messages.
"After this night I took a dark turn and found myself being subject to relentless abuse from older men," AN says now. "Some of whom were in the same music scene, all of which at the time I thought was normal. I did not realise I was being groomed and manipulated and it really did take me a long time to realise this was my reality."
AN said she initially found herself in that scene because of her love of music and used it as an escape, those gigs becoming her "happy place".
"It is sad that our innocence and love for this scene and music was chewed up and spat out by someone as vile as Hanson, when we should have been protected," she says. AN said Hanson didn't seem like a creep and, in her case, didn't flick a switch and suddenly attack her. Instead, he made her feel special and acted like he wanted to get to know her while slowly dragging her into his "spider web".
"I think because he initially came off as nice... and not as the sick person that he truly was it was so easy for him to do all of the things he did and somehow continue to get away with it," AN says.
AN says she came forward after seeing the police media release about Hanson's arrest because initially she wanted to help corroborate, where she could, the stories of other women.
"I thought about how young they were and how I wanted to help them get justice," AN says. "My brain still wasn't registering that I deserved justice, too. I wanted to help these women, but they turned out to be the ones that helped me."
AN says the Hanson case showed child victims of sexual abuse should be listened to, taken seriously and protected when they first make a complaint.
"There is help out there and I hope that the good that comes from our stories inspires or helps victims come forward to seek their own justice and claim the title they deserve as survivors," AN says.
'I DATED A PREDATOR'
LC has a different perspective from a lot of the other girls because for a number of years, while he sexually assaulted teenage fans, she was Hanson's girlfriend.
"My abuse was very different," she says. "I had three years of being manipulated and I pretty much lost my teenage years, where you kind of grow into an adult. I had no socialisation. I had no friends. I was very isolated. Pretty much all I had was my family and him. So for me, I guess I missed out on that age where you go out and go to parties and do all that, that kind of never happened for me." LC says she eventually got the courage to leave Hanson after he had been kicked out of her family home for cheating on her.
"Obviously he tried to manipulate me to come back, but I eventually got the courage to just say 'that's it'," she says. LC says she knew Hanson was unfaithful because people had caught him with other girls, but she had been too fearful of him to leave before that point. She says she did not know at the time the age of the girls and came forward to speak to police in 2019 to help confirm or give credence where she could to some of the allegations from the period when she was with Hanson.
"Obviously I harbour a lot of guilt over those girls [who were victims of Hanson] during my time with him," she says. "I saw a lot of things that I probably should have done something about, but being so fearful of him ... going further and looking into that kind of stuff was not something I could have done. But looking back I should have. So I do hold a lot of guilt for that. But coming forward and helping these girls was, I guess, in a way therapeutic."
LC says Hanson kept her separate from his gigs and thinks he made her his girlfriend because she was slightly older than his fans and their relationship could act as a sort of cover, a way of keeping up appearances that the rumours about his interest in young girls were just that. But she says she was manipulated and groomed just like the others and fell for the stories he used on others about being homeless so he could move in.
"I believe he preyed on girls who felt like they were outcasts," LC says. "He is the attractive, popular guy showing them attention and then they cling to it because they'd never had that attention before. He obviously knew the ones to go for. He played on that and I guess that's why we all fell for his manipulation."
LC says it was difficult to come to terms with her own abuse and it wasn't until she relived it that she realised she was a victim too. She says as well as gaslighting her and controlling her, Hanson also groomed her family to an extent, making them think he was the perfect partner.
"I kind of closed off everything that had happened to me for a good 10 years," she says. "Being so young you don't understand that the behaviours that are coming from that person are coming from a manipulative standpoint. Obviously we can look back now and see that he was being manipulative to get us to do what he wanted. But when you're a kid you don't really learn that, it's not really highlighted that people can be manipulative. And I guess also being so young, you don't understand the ramifications from that, the impact on you emotionally until later when you realise you're pretty much bound to this person." Diagnosed with complex PTSD, LC says her healing journey is still ongoing and she is learning to cope with her trauma, process her guilt and rewire her brain to react differently.
FORMING NEW BONDS
Maddie was 21 when she was sexually assaulted by Hanson, the only adult victim and an outlier compared to the others.
"I was well above the age that he would normally go for," she says. "It was very opportunistic."
It was 2014 and she had organised a gathering at her unit for her then partner's friends, which included Hanson.
But when Hanson, then 27, arrived early to the party he sexually assaulted her before Maddie's partner arrived home.
"He led the conversation to how we never ended up together or we had never hung out together on our own," Maddie says. "That conversation came up and then it was just like a switch flicked for him and he was like right, this is my moment and I'm going to take it."
Her attack being different and not fitting the narrative was something she initially struggled with and she worried she would not be believed. But she says she now realised how important it was that she spoke up.
"I think the message that I want to get across is just because your story doesn't fit everybody else's doesn't mean you weren't a victim," she says. "For me my story is very different to all the other girls and that made a massive difference in calculating how long he had been a predator for. I know there were discussions in court that he was active until 2011, but what happened to me occurred in 2014."
Maddie says she wanted to speak about what happened to hopefully empower anyone else in a similar situation.
"The major thing for me speaking out was that if by any chance there was another girl who was in a similar situation to me I would want my voice to kind of give them theirs as well," she says. "Because I found for so many years I suppressed my own voice and in a way coming forward and speaking about it helped me to be able to deal with the fact that this has happened to me. I held it in for so long and if me speaking my truth can help someone else speak theirs then that is the main thing for me. It has given me that strength where I'm like I'm not going to be a statistic, I'm not going to live my life in the fear that this is going to happen again, I'm not going to allow him to have that power over me."
As for Hanson, facing the next two decades behind bars, Maddie encapsulated what the women think of the situation he now finds himself in. "He has taken so much from so many other people that he doesn't deserve to ever have any joy in his life," she says.
When Hanson was jailed last year, the girls who he had traumatised - who mostly didn't know each other beforehand but were now connected over a common history - went to the pub.
Now they have a group chat, a place to talk and offer support. Some of them say they once formed a trauma bond to Hanson, an emotional attachment that develops out of a repeated cycle of abuse, devaluation, and positive reinforcement. But now they are finding a more positive bond with each other.
There have been a great number of victim impact statements read in Newcastle District Court over the years. But few sent shivers down the spine like the one AC delivered on July 9 last year. It ended with a powerful punch that perhaps best sums up how many of the women feel: "I spent a long time repairing my life," AC said, staring at Hanson. "He may have won the battle but he has not won the war. Daniel Hanson may have had a front row seat to my downfall, but today is the last day that he gets to hear my story and today is the last day I identify as one of his victims."
Hanson only glanced up from his feet once, making eye contact during that last sentence when AC said she would no longer be labelled as a victim. Whatever power he had over these women was gone.
- 1800 RESPECT
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