Graham Ovenden

A prelude to BEFORE THE FALL

If you have followed the Ovenden site (in the final afterword) it shows a considerable number of criminal actions by both the Cornish Police Force, and also that of the Metropolitan. A great deal of the information relating to this disgraceful situation is shown in the police own files which are also backed by the court's decision to remove an important prosecution witness from entering the trial (Ovenden v Regina) for unreliability and downright dishonesty. It should be noted here that the female concerned was a complainant, not a victim, who never entered the courtroom to give evidence and thus is not immune from public scrutiny.

The fact that the Cornish Police still seem incapable of admitting to their numerous peccadilloes gives greater strength for the argument that a number of both forces be prosecuted for numerous offences.

Of course you will note that it is a criminal offence not to disclose all aspects of criminality if it be known to one; this is the case of the files Ovenden presents to the public on his website. As the materials (both files, art and ephemera) were returned by the the police in person it is impossible to gainsay their validity. Also the published volume Before the Fall deals in greater depth with these police misdemeanours which includes gross anti-Semitic collaboration and failure to investigate the admission of very serious crimes by one Donna Berry. The Police have done nothing to rectify these evils and thus must be regarded as conspiratorial with this person; a situation not dissimilar to that of the infamous “Nick” (Carl Beech) who was tried recently, and convicted for numerous very serious offences. Berry, in vicious and dishonest intent, is the female equivalent of Carl Beech.

The present (late July) scandal perpetrated by the Metropolitan Police Force, ie falsifying search warrants etc is relevant to the Ovenden case. The police knew of Berry's criminal and dishonest propensities and used her (not here) concocted statements to gain search warrants on the Ovenden premises, Barley Splatt in Cornwall … The rest is history!

AFTERWORD

We are unable to publish some of this material currently due to the ongoing legal process that it documents. Additional material will be published as it is allowed. There is a current application to the Criminal Case Review Commission which has passed the first stage as having grounds for a review, but since defendants still in prison get preferential treatment, and the Commission is fully occupied with all the cases that have been identified relating to police non-disclosure it will be the new year before the Ovenden case is likely to reach the top of the pile.

In the meantime a painting that was sold in August has disappeared in transit. A local shop had been helpful and booked an overnight carrier via their TransglobalExpress account. The parcel was picked up by UPS. It left Exeter on the 23rd, passed through Tamworth over night and reached Stanford Le Hope on the 24th, but was never delivered. A chase on the 29th is reported on the tracking record, and then a report on the 30th August that it had been "seized by customs". This has since been amended to "Your package has been delayed due to a Government regulatory agency hold." but there is no information on who that is. HMRC advise that they have no record of a seizure and since it was not being imported or exported why would they even see the parcel? UPS are claiming they have no paperwork relating to it "being passed to the police", but it seems strange that they would simply pass a parcel to a third party and not expect a reciept of some sort? So where is the picture today? It had not been chased up last month as it was advised that "Seizure paperwork can take several weeks" but since contacting HMRC this seems not to be the case especially since one only has 45 days to appeal a seizure. The image appears several times through the website and IWF have no interest in it, so just who is taking exception and why?

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THE FACTS

It will be a revelation to many that as a young boy Ovenden was introduced to sexual abuse by a staff member at one of his summer residences. ( The McAlpine Notes )

There have been several previous investigations and prosecutions relating to work produced by Ovenden, none of which were successful. Works such as States of Grace were deemed to be artistic and not child pornography, but some parties were never happy that their views were not accepted by the courts. The Metropolitan Police seems to be one of those bodies but in 2010 the suggestion was made that Ovenden had been sexually abusing his models and following the failure of their 2009 prosecution because they could not provide their own staff in court, they switched tack.

The new case that they were to present in court in 2013 was based on the premiss that abuse had taken place as early as 1972 in London and went on until the late 1980’s at Ovenden’s home in Cornwall, however these allegations were trimmed by the Judge as a witness was proven to be unbelievable. Two further witnesses declined in court substantiate the police allegations, as far as they were concerned no abuse had taken place, the allegations the police were presenting never happened. This only left one victims allegations in the period. None of the other models interviewed about their time at Barley Splatt felt they had suffered any abuse and were happy to have been photographed. There had been no photographic sessions after 1987 and all subsequent artwork was completed using the earlier pictures.

The 1992 prosecution in the US centred on a single image in the book 'States of Grace'. It was dropped when the model testified that in the image she is not acting sexually and Ovenden had never asked her to do so. She felt that she was being accused of being obscene.

The following March, sees the first raid on Barley Splatt by the Obscene Publications Squad. This is nicely covered in the Independent’s eventual coverage of the event in 1994

No prosecution resulted from this and despite the publicity, no victims of abuse came forward.

A second raid on Barley Splatt was made in November 2006 again targeting indecent images with no evidence of any child abuse. Since the raid had taken a lot of personal material and uncontroversial historic items, a dossier of evidence was created and delivered in person in 2008 to the Attorney General, Baroness Scotland: also, the then head of the CPS, by the senior lawyer David Morris. This was created manually since the only computer had been seized and not all of the pages now exist, but a partial replica has been sorted from what material is still available. The trial is eventually scheduled for October 2009 but this collapses due to a lack of police witnesses. The new hearing in April 2010 lasts 5 minutes and the case is thrown as once again key witnesses fail to appear.

On 19 April 2010, the Western Morning News said the Child Abuse Investigation Team of the Metropolitan Police, the force which had carried out the three and a half-year investigation for the trial, was now investigating Ovenden over allegations of child sex abuse. In addition to the allegations presented in court numerous other allegations are documented in the police disclosures but were proven to be false. That the police were aware that much of the abuse claims were fabricated and that in addition to the two witnesses who testified to the same in court, there were several other such witnesses who were not disclosed at the time. ( see FALSE ALLEGATIONS below )

In March 2013, Ovenden went on trial at Truro Crown Court, accused with nine charges of indecency with a child and indecent assault on four victims aged between six and 14. As said previously, two of the victims refused in court to endorse the police allegations and the judge dismissed the claims of the third alleged victim leaving only one victims claims to be decided by the jury along with charges relating to images which should have been addressed in 2009 case. While there is much coverage in the national press, this is all based on the reporting of a single local report who only attended the prosecution side of the hearing. There were no press presence to hear the defence side of the case. (see Media Coverage )

On 2 April, Ovenden was found guilty by majority verdict of six charges of indecency with a child and one charge of indecent assault against a child and is later sentenced to 12 months imprisonment, suspended for two years.

On 9 October 2013 the Appeal Court increased his sentence to an immediate prison term of 27 months and refused to leave to appeal the original conviction. It is felt that this was at least in part due to the recent exposure at that time of the Savile abuse which prevented an impartial review of the facts.

Following Ovenden’s completion of his sentence, a Confiscation Hearing takes place to discuss the return of the material the police have been holding since the 2006 raid. Judge Roscoe hearing the case decides that a substantial amount of historic material should be destroyed. The threat of destroying historic material even gets discussed a few days later in the House of Lords (3:30pm), Having run out of time during the initial hearing a second date is assigned but by that time Judge Roscoe has lost track of what she has or has not flagged for destruction and the final ruling is somewhat confused but includes both historic and appellant material. .

However when the situation is appealed, and is heard at Isleworth Crown Court on the 19th and 20th May 2016 in front of the male recorder and two female JP's. The appeal court overturns the destruction orders on 60 of the images and in 2016 all but four images are finally returned to Ovenden. The returned images include those on which the indecent image convictions were based, so in effect the appeal court has already reversed the classification of them as indecent. (see RETURNED MATERIAL below) It is perhaps interesting that while the original case gained a lot of main stream media attention, there is nothing about the completion of the Confiscation Process or the appeal which would have made much more interesting reading.

Currently Ovenden is preparing a second appeal against the conviction as recent disclosures which were previously withheld by the police have provided new evidence that the single remaining victims evidence is unreliable. (see POLICE CRIMINALITY below)

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FALSE ALLEGATIONS

Discredited Allegations by Donna Berry

THE SECOND HEAD

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