# 1 Scott Neeson accuses David Fletcher of 'grooming' young girls

“Little doubt!” is one of those slippery expressions intended to vilify but which leaves Neeson with a ‘Get Out Of Jail Free’ card of sorts if it turns out that there is no evidence that Fletcher devoted “his time to grooming young girls.”

Scott Neeson’s background is in marketing. He knows how to use words to sell his product (children in distress) or to destroy the reputation of a competitor – in this case, David Fletcher.

Did Scott Neeson have any evidence to support his defamatory assertion that Fletcher was grooming young girls? There is none to be found in Andrew Drummond’s 20^th June 2010 article:

“Preying On The Garbage Dump Children”.

“Convicted child sexual abuser runs ‘charity’ for rubbish dump kids in Cambodia.”

Or had evidence been found by APLE, SISHA, CEOPS, the Anti-Human Trafficking and Juvenile Protection unit of the Ministry of the Interior or the British Embassy – all of which organizations were, by their own admission, looking for such evidence?

I set out in search of this evidence in support of Neeson’s allegations and was more than a little surprised by what I found.

I stumbled upon Scott Neeson’s involvement  in the arrest and conviction of David Fletcher by chance. I was (and still am) in the process of making a documentary which, amongst other things, deals with Scott Neeson’s illegal removal of children from their impoverished families to fill beds in dormitories in his Cambodian Children’s Fund orphanage-style institutions.  I have written extensively about this on the following blog:

http://cambodianchildrensfund.blogspot.com.au/

Through my research I learnt that back in the early days of the Cambodian Children’s Fund, when Scott Neeson was helping families living in the Phnom Penh rubbish dump, that he had a ‘competitor’ – David Fletcher. Fletcher was also helping families in the dump. There was no love lost between the Scott Neeson and David Fletcher. Indeed, there was no love lost between David Fletcher and a great many expatriates in Cambodia who, for a variety of reasons, disliked Fletcher intensely. Peter Hogan, for instance, referred to Fletcher online as a:

“man who's been a shitstain on the underpants of Cambodia since he arrived (having been kicked out of the scuzziest corner of Thailand) three (?) years ago.”

That David Fletcher had never been “kicked out…of Thailand” is a detail that Peter Hogan (keeping_it_reil) was not going to stand in the way of a good story!

In subsequent posts it will become apparent why so many expatriates, using aliases to hide their true identity, set out to vilify Fletcher on Peter Hogan’s blog site Khmer440. (It has been possible to discover the identity of many of these anonymous bloggers and hopefully some readers of this blog will be identify those I have not as yet been able to put a name to.)

From the outset I have kept in the back of my mind the expression “where there is smoke there is fire.” A cliche, yes, but sometimes cliches contain more than a germ of truth. Could it be, despite the many factual inaccuracies to be found on Khmer440, that there might be an element of truth in the allegations that Fletcher was ‘grooming’ young girls? I also had to consider this possibility that despite there being copious amounts of Khmer440 smoke, that’s all there was – smoke. Smoke and mirrors. Smoke, mirrors, spite and mean-spiritedness of a kind I have never encountered before.

Whether the likes of Peter Hogan’s (alias ‘keeping_it_reil’) vilification of Fletcher as far back as 2009 had any basis in verifiable facts or amounted to a witch hunt was what I sought to discover.

In my quest for the truth the scuttlebutt, rumours or innuendo to be found on Khmer440 has played no other role than to provide me with clues as to the questions I should, as a journalist, be asking.  It is the duty of a properly constituted court (in this case, the Phnom Penh Municipal Court) to ask such questions when making a decision as to the guilt or innocence of a person charged with a crime as serious as rape. Had the judges asked these questions?

Given his own vested interest in lying to me, I did not presume at the outset that anything David Fletcher told me was true. Indeed, I worked on the presumption that whilst he is, in law, entitled to the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, that everything he told me might be a lie.

In this blog I am primarily interested in facts that can be verified as true; that can be corroborated by 2^nd and 3^rd parties who have no vested interest in either Fletcher’s guilt or innocence of the crime of having raped Yang Dany.

NEXT

The 20^th June 2010 article written by Andrew Drummond that marks the beginning of a saga that continues to this day – with David Fletcher in jail in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.