# 10 "Peter Hogan's Excellent Pedophile Adventure!"

Peter Hogan (aka ‘keeping_it_reil’), former ‘owner’ of Khmer440, boasts gleefully online about the role he played in having David Fletcher jailed for rape:

“I recall that 4(!) years ago when Grandslam and myself hatched our plan, we made a sequential list of desirable outcomes beginning with getting his 'charity' closed then moving onto having his shithole-in-the-wall bar closed, having him outed in the press (and fuck, did we achieve that one!) etc etc.

Today, the last box on the sheet ('Fletch in Prey Sar') was finally ticked off so I'll allow myself a few strong drinkies in celebration and will be raising my glass to Grandslam back in the UK.

Goodnight Cambodia and good mental health.”

NOTE:

I was banned from Khmer440 for asking ‘difficult’ questions of Peter Hogan’s mate, Scott Neeson, CEO of the Cambodian Children’s Fund. I remain banned today. Hence my Cambodia440 blogsite.

$$$

“Notorious British paedophile expected to spend most of his life in mosquito-plagued Cambodian jail after raping 15-year-old girl he plied with champagne”

So begins Richard Shears’ 3^rd Oct 2013 article for Britain’s ‘Daily Mail’ about David Fletcher, sentenced in 2010 to 10 years jail for the rape of Yang Dany in 2009.

A few verifiable facts:

- David Fletcher has never been convicted of a pedophile offence in Britain or anywhere else in the world.

- Yang Dany was not 15 at the time of the alleged rapes. She referred to herself as David Fletcher’s ‘fiance’ and was three months shy of 17.

- There is no reference, in any court document, to David Fletcher plying Yang Dany with champagne.

Richard Shears has, by his own admission, lifted all of his ‘facts’ from other journalists who, in turn, have lifted them from an article published by Andrew Drummond entitled:

“Preying On The Garbage Dump Children”.

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

Just as ‘facts, can be made up to suit a journalist’s agenda, so too can verifiable facts be ignored if they stand in the way of telling a good (in this case damning) story.

A pertinent fact ignored by Richard Shears is that in June 2010, when Yang Dany was one month away from being 18, she told Andrew Drummond that David Fletcher was, her ‘sweetheart’, her ‘boyfriend’ and her ‘fiance’. She referred to him as a ‘good man’. These are not the descriptions one would expect a young woman to use when referring to a man who had ‘brutally raped’ her 15 months earlier – on 15^th and 22^nd March 2009!

Writes Richard Shears, in Oct 2013:

“Fletcher) fled to Thailand in the wake of claims that he was using a charity to groom for sex a number of poverty-stricken children who lived in a rubbish dump.”

‘Claims’ is a slippery word. The reader can all too easily presume (and is invited to presume) that such ‘claims’ are  based in verifiable facts, whilst the journalist who uses the word can let him or herself off the hook if the ‘claims turn out to be untrue: “I did not say it was true! Only that someone claimed it was true.”

In accordance with this approach to the use of words, a journalist in search of a story can refer to any ‘claim’ that suits his or her purposes.

Whilst Richard Shears does not mention who made these grooming claims, Andrew Drummond does,  quoting Scott Neeson, Executive Director of the Cambodian Children’s Fund as saying:

“There is little doubt Fletcher devotes his time to grooming young girls….The fact is these children can be bought. It’s difficult to stop it.”

“Little doubt!” another of those slippery expressions intended to vilify but with an ‘out’ of sorts if it turns out that there is no evidence that Fletcher devoted “his time to grooming young girls.”

At the time Andrew Drummond’s June 2010 article was published, and at the time of Fletcher’s  arrest one month later, there was no evidence at all that Fletcher had been ‘grooming’ girls in Cambodia. This is, as we will see, a verifiable fact. There were only Scott Neeson’s unsubstantiated allegations of ‘grooming’ and scuttlebutt to be found on a popular Cambodian blog site:  Khmer440.

Scott Neeson again, talking with Andrew Drummond:

“The British Embassy have been told about Fletcher. Many organizations have files on him, but nothing has happened. If you can get this guy sent packing you are doing a service to the children here.”

One month later, in July 2010, Fletcher was ‘sent packing’ – arrested by Thai police, with the complicity of the British Embassy in Thailand and charged, at the outset, with breaching Thailand’s Immigration laws.

Was Fletcher subsequently held in prison in Thailand on the basis of information contained in the files Neeson refers to? Or on the basis of the ‘facts’ contained in Drummond’s article? Or was David Fletcher the victim of a modern day witch hunt that began on Peter Hogan’s Khmer440 blog, took on a life of its own and was picked up by journalists keen for a sensational story and not too much concerned with factual accuracy?

Richard Shears again:

“Fletcher, from Cambridge, has a history of assaults on children. On one occasion in 1967, he was sentenced by the Norwich Crown Court to 18 months in jail for the statutory rape of a 15-year-old girl, who he was said to have plied with champagne.”

A few verifiable facts:

- Fletcher does not have a history of assaults on children.

- The statutory rape case was heard in 1998, not 1967.

I have pointed out to Shears how factually incorrect his article was, asking him where he acquired his information:

“I really can't recall where I got the info from - but it would have been almost certainly from either the Phnom Penh Post or the Cambodia Daily. And not from 'lifting' anything. I always call a reporter or journalist who would have covered the story at the time. It's the only recourse I have if I'm not there. If the Mail asks me for a story, too, whatever it might be, I have to supply it and always do my best to check out the facts.”

Is “I…always do my best to check out the facts” good enough for a journalist when being mistaken about the facts can lead to a man being referred to as a pedophile and falsely accused, in a very public context, of having committed a crime he did not commit? A crime as reprehensible as rape?

Richard Shears, along with Andrew Drummond and all other journalists who have fed off this ‘pedophile’ story have not set a very high bar for themselves when it comes to factual accuracy. (Drummond was convicted earlier this year, 2014, by the Pattaya Provincial Criminal Court on charges of criminal defamation. Drummond has form when it comes to not allowing the facts to stand in the way of a good story!)

Richard Shears again:

“According to The Cambodia Daily, Fletcher is the first pedophile ever to be sent back to Cambodia to serve a prison sentence. Last night, Mr Samleang Seila, director of the anti-paedophile group Action Pour les Enfants, spoke of his gratitude to the authorities for pressing on with their attempts to have Fletcher extradited. 'We are satisfied with this extradition,' Mr Seila told the Daily.

OK, lets take a collective deep breath and deal, calmly, with references to David Fletcher as a pedophile. It is worth adding here that David Fletcher’s ‘rape’ trial in Cambodia was held in secret. Fletcher himself was unable to attend (he was in jail in Thailand), he was not legally represented, could present no evidence in his defense and no representatives of the media, of the British Embassy or of any human rights NGOs were in attendance to observe the proceedings.

So, in the spirit of the dictum that an accused person should be presumed innocent until proven guilty, let’s hear what Fletcher has to say about what he refers to as

his ‘inappropriate relationship’ with the 15 year old girl in the UK:

“The young lady in the UK was  adventurous, voluptuous and mature for her years and had plenty of boyfriends. We had a fling for a few months and all was very mutual. She wanted to live with me and run away with me, which of course was totally impractible ( All recorded evidence ). I was charged with statutory rape, not rape, she was a few months under 16, the age of consent in the UK. Yes, when we had private times we did enjoy our own videos. The judge watched these and listened to phone tapes as evidence. His comments were ’the young lady was not an unwilling partner’. For this offence I was sentenced to 15 months incarceration which equated to seven and half months. If this had been construed as pedophilia, my sentence would have been seven and half years.”

Yes, his relationship with a 15 year old (even by Fletcher’s own admission) was inappropriate and he makes no complaint about his incarceration for it. He was not, however, in accordance with any commonly accepted definitions of the word, a ‘pedophile’:

“A pedophile is a person 16 years of age or older who is primarily or exclusively attracted to children.”

“An adult who is sexually attracted to young children.

The word ‘pedophile’ is much better suited to sensationalist journalism of the kind Shears and Drummond practice than the phrase “consenting 15 year old”.

The fact that David Fletcher is not the ‘notorious British pedophile’ described by Richard Shears does not mean, of course, that he may not have been engaging in pedophile activities whilst in Cambodia. Despite Fletcher’s insistence, to me, that he had not done so, I had to do my own research. After all, it is a rare prisoner who will admit that he is guilty of the crimes for which he has been incarcerated. Fletcher has a vested interest in lying to me and, at the outset, I worked on the presumption that everything he told me could be a lie. It was facts I was interested in. Verifiable facts.

Richard Shears again:

“In Cambodia police built up a file of evidence showing that Fletcher had used his charity to groom young girls - and also their families - with the intention of having sex with the them.”

It was this ‘file of evidence’ I was interested in looking at. I soon discovered that there was no ‘file of evidence’ that Fletcher had been grooming girls with the intention of having sex with them. Shears had acquired this information from the Khmer440 blog. It was backed by no evidence at all. I will deal with the role Khmer440 has played in David Fletcher’s fate in some detail in my next post.

Whilst there is no ‘file of evidence’ suggesting that Fletcher ‘groomed’ young girls, there are a lot of court documents relating to the nature of the charges against him and the evidence in support of these charges. I read these and it soon became apparent just how important dates were.

A few dates to bear in mind:

- Yang Dany, the alleged ‘victim’ of Fletcher’s two rapes, was born 6^th July 1992.

- The alleged rapes took place on 17^th and 22^nd March 2009, when Yang Dany was almost 17.

- In June 2010, one month short of her 18^th birthday, Yang Dany, in taped interviews with journalist Andrew Drummond, referred to David Fletcher as her ‘fiance’, her ‘sweetheart’ and her ‘boyfriend’ and refers to her future husband as a ‘good man’.  

- Yang Dany made no reference, in her June 2010 interview with Drummond, to her ‘fiance’, ‘sweetheart’ or ‘boyfriend’ having raped her 15 months previously.

- In  June 2010, Yang Dany had not told Scott Neeson, the NGOs APLE, SISHA or CEOPS, the British Embassy or the Anti-Human Trafficking and Juvenile Protection unit of the Ministry of the Interior that she had been raped twice by Fletcher in 2009.

- In July 2010, one month later, David Fletcher was charged with having raped Yang Dany’s 15 months earlier, in March 2009. Yang Dany did not file the complaint. Her mother did. In filing a complaint on behalf of her 18 year old daughter in June 2010,  Sekun asked for $30,000 in compensation for Yang Dany’s rape.

How was it that David Fletcher could be transformed from ‘sweetheart’, ‘boyfriend’, ‘fiance’ and a ‘good man’ into ‘brutal rapist’ in just 4 weeks?  Why was no-one interested in even asking this question? Why were no alarm bells ringing for APLE, SISHA, CEOPS, Andrew Drummond, Richard Shears, for any members of the Cambodian media (English language and Khmer) or for the many human rights groups working in Cambodia?

The cast of individuals and organizations who seemed, at the outset of my investigations, to have played a role in sending Fletcher ‘packing’  is a long one. It includes Scott Neeson, Peter Hogan (alias ‘keeping it reil’ from Khmer440), the NGOs APLE, SISHA and CEOPS, and the British Embassies of both Cambodia and Thailand.  (The British Embassy in Thailand ‘accidentally’ cancelled Mr Fletcher’s passport and then destroyed it ‘accidentally’ despite the passport and its contents containing evidence that Mr Fletcher was not in Cambodia at the time of the alleged rapes. This raises a whole lot of questions, to be found at: http://cambodia440.blogspot.com/2014/10/4-how-did-british-embassy-in-thailand.html. These questions remain unanswered.)

If any of these individuals or organizations had bothered to read the court documents, published after Fletcher had been convicted to 10 years in jail for rape, one in particular would have caught their attention - the report written by Dr Mao Heng, Deputy Director of the Phnom Penh Municipal Department of Health on 8^th September 2010. In his report Dr Mao Heng declared that Yang Dany’s hymen is intact; that after being ‘brutally raped’ twice she remained a virgin.

Yang Dany’s intact hymen after having been raped raises a Pandora’s box of questions.

Next: We go back to the beginning of the David Fletcher saga with some questions for Peter Hogan.