Gary Glitter \nLONDON - Just days after 1970s glam-rock star Gary Glitter was imprisoned for pleading guilty to child porn, the woman who accused him of sexual abuse when she was 14 has broken her anonymity and begun to speak out against child sexual abuse.
Allison Brown is now 34 and a mother of three children, and she tells Reuters she did not feel people would believe her until Glitter (whose real name is Paul Gadd) was behind bars.
"All I want him to do," she says, "is say sorry and acknowledge what he is capable of."
The 55-year-old Glitter had been cleared of several sexual assault counts last Friday, but he was jailed for possessing what British authorities called a vast library of child pornography stored in his computer.
Brown insisted during a radio interview that she told the truth in court when accusing Glitter of years of sex abuse after first forcing himself on her when she was 14 years old. Glitter's attorney had accused her of inventing the story for money. Brown says she waited almost two decades to speak to police because she feared no one would believe her.
Brown also says she and Glitter's daughter, Sarah, had tried persuading the singer to seek treatment, but he would not even admit doing anything wrong. And now she pushes other such victims to speak out sooner. "When you are being abused by someone, you think you are going to get into trouble because you let him do that to you," she says. "Once you are a victim you stay a victim until you change. I'm not a victim any more. I've changed.''
Until this case, Glitter had been in and out of the public eye in small stages since his early 1970s heyday. Following years of obscure music work, he latched onto the David Bowie-triggered "glam-rock" craze, adopted his flamboyant persona and style, and hit the British and American pop charts with "Rock and Roll Part 2". His next biggest British hit, "I'm The Leader of the Gang," was also a hit in America - for the blues-roots rock trio Brownsville Station.
He never had another American hit the size of "Rock and Roll Part 2", now a staple at sports events nationwide. But he enjoyed several more British hits until the 1980s found him surviving bankruptcy, two suicide attempts, and an auction of his personal possessions to pay back taxes. Until his child porn arrest, his annual Christmas tours were major British and European successes, and he was reported to have been considered for a film appearance with the Spice Girls.
