# 38 An invitation to Andrew Drummond to write an article based on facts and not scuttlebutt, rumour and innuendo spread by Peter Hogan and Scott Neeson.

David Fletcher claims that he was not in Cambodia at the time of the alleged rapes – 15^th and 22^nd March 2009. The only evidence of this that would stand up in a Cambodian court is to be found in Mr Fletcher’s passport. The British Embassy in Bangkok, knowing this to be the case, destroyed Mr Fletcher’s passport without making photocopies of the pages that he needed to present a defense in court. The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office has now provided two different explanations as to why and how Mr Fletcher’s passport was destroyed. In one version it was a ‘mistake’ and in the other, in accordance with standard Embassy protocols. Neither version of what happened to the passport withstands close scrutiny.

Four days away from David Fletcher’s ‘re-trial’, (20^th Nov 2014) the woman he allegedly raped, Yang Dany, has been spirited out of Cambodia by the NGO (Action Pour Les Enfants) so that she will not be available for cross-examination.

Dear Andrew Drummond

You have answered none of the 16^th Oct 2014 questions I asked you previously regarding the factual accuracy of your June 20^th 2010 article “Preying On The Garbage Dump Children.”

http://cambodia440.blogspot.com/2014/10/3-some-questions-for-andrew-drummond-re.html

Allowing for the possibility that you are not completely devoid of moral conscience and that you may feel some guilt about the damage done to Mr Fletcher by your article, please accept this invitation to come to Phnom Penh to report on the ‘re-trail’ of David Fletcher on 20^th Nov. If you were to report the facts that emerge from the court case you may be able to make at least some small gesture towards undoing the damage you have done.

I am re-printing your article in its entirely here on my blog, interspersed with my own questions and observations:

“Convicted child sexual abuser runs ' charity' for rubbish dump kids in Cambodia

The atmosphere was tense in a little hut next to a massive toxic garbage mountain, for many years the sole source of income for poverty stricken families here in the capital of Cambodia.”

“Convicted child sexual abuser” is not an accurate description of a man whose one crime against a ‘child’ is having had consensual sex with 15 year old girl.   

Inside the corrugated shack in Dhamnak Thom Village No. 1 Scots born Scott Neeson of the Cambodian Children's Fund was negotiating with the mother of a pretty 17-yr-old girl to save her from a British child abuser.

Your use of the phrase “a British child abuser” is intended to set Fletcher up from the outset as ‘the villain’. Consensual sex with 15 year old girl was inappropriate and Illegal but your constant use of the expression ‘child abuser’ is inaccurate.

The mother 58-yr-old Khaeng Sokun was once a teenage mum, who lost her first husband and baby twin daughters to the ' Killing Fields' of the Khmer Rouge.

They were taken away in the late 70's by a Khmer Rouge cadres.  She heard her husband was clubbed to death after telling the Khmer Rouge he could pack no more fertilizer bags for Brother No I, Pol Pot. She does not know exactly what happened to her children. Just that they never returned.

Two baby girls lost to the Khmer Rouge. Child abuser wants the third.

Your third reference to Fletcher as a ‘child abuser’ will have had the desired effect on your readers: David Fletcher is a man who abuses children! Great for newspaper sales. Nor so great for those, like Fletcher, who become grist to the mill of this brand of sensationalist journalism.

Now she is about to give her third daughter 17-yr-old, Yang Dany,  to a convicted British child abuser for the princely sum of US$150 to help clear her family debts.

A fourth reference to David Fletcher as a ‘child abuser’! Really, Andrew! Are you familiar with the expressions ‘over-egging the pudding’ and ‘methinks she doth protest too much’?

'But we owe US$600. How else can I pay this off?' Dany wants to help her family. He future husband is a good man. She feels sorry for him. He comes here and gives everybody food. '

There are signs of frustration on Scott's face.  Bawling the mother out is not an option .  He tells the mother that Dany is a star pupil. She will go to University if she continues with her studies and all the family will benefit.  But her husband-to-be has already convinced Dany to stop going to English classes. Clearly he does not need to communicate with the bride he wants.

Both Yang Dany and Kheang Sekun deny that this conversation with you ever occurred. Could you please produce the audio tape to prove whether or not they are speaking the truth?

Of course you are under no obligation at all to answer any of my questions or to produce any audio tape. I am merely a journalist who stumbled upon this story, via my investigations into Scott Neeson, and who is trying to find answers to questions. The more people such as yourself refuse to answer any questions at al, the more questions arise. A veritable Pandora’s Box of them now.

The main question, of course, is: “How and why was David Fletcher charged with and convicted of rape when there is not evidence at all that any rape took place?”

This is a question that no-one seems interested in asking! Why?

How many other Caucasian men are there in Cambodian jails found guilty in the total absence of any evidence of their guilt?  

'We will help you with your debts,' says Scott to the mother, who wants to return to Kompong Som Province after the marriage. 'Please give this serious thought.'

Dany and Kheang Sekun both deny that there was any suggestion of David Fletcher marrying Dany! Your audio tape will, no doubt, reveal whether or not they are telling the truth.

Scott Neeson never helped Yang Dany and Kheang Sekun pay their debts. Indeed, if you read through the following blog entry you will discover how Scott Neeson deals with debts accrued by those who rent hovels from the Cambodian Children’s Fund and who get $12.50 behind in their rent.

http://cambodianchildrensfund.blogspot.com.au/2014/11/25-scott-nesson-locks-poor-family-out.html

Two hours later at the Flora Bar in Phnom Penh's Street 136 we caught up with the man who plans to share her bed.

In the months preceding the publication of  your article APLE visited Yang Dany and her mother several times to ask about David Fletcher. APLE was desperate to find evidence of wrongdoing on Fletcher’s part.

If you were to come to Phnom Penh, Andrew, I could show you the two filmed interviews I conducted with them. Unedited. Both mother and daughter insist that David Fletcher was nothing other than a friend who helped not only their family but many other ‘dump families’ also.

Sixty six year old David Fletcher, wearing an Indiana Jones fedora, had his hand inside the brassiere of a young Cambodian hostess and was happy to tell me: 'She's shaven you know. That's how I like them. No pubic hair.'

David Fletcher insists that he never said this to you. Please produce the audio tape?

An integral part of a journalists’ job is holding others accountable for their actions. This involves not accepting, unquestioningly, that what you have been told to be the truth is, in fact, the truth. The same applies for journalists themselves (and I include myself here). We should be held accountable for what we write – especially if what we write is likely to have a deleterious impact on the reputation of those about whom we write. We should be as transparent and accountable as we expect others to be.

Produce the audio tape, Andrew.

My sons have disowned me. Who cares?*

'Fletch the Letch', as he has come to be known,  continued: 'My two grown up sons have disowned me. They did not like the fact that my girlfriends were younger than theirs.  Who cares?  It's their loss. 

Who cares? Mr Fletcher cares. Enormously! He has been alienated from his children, his friends and his community back home as a result of this article of yours and another, even more sensationalist and factually inaccurate, written by Richard Shears. This is kind of damage journalists such as yourself inflict on those whom you exploit – in the telling of stories in which facts and truth are much less important (indeed, often irrelevant) to the telling of a sensational story that will sell newspapers. Do you see the lives destroyed by your journalism as unfortunate collateral damage? How do you justify to yourself writing lies that you must know are going to shatter other people’s lives?

As for ‘Fletch the Letch’ this expression was used by one person on Khmer440. In my research to date (much more extensive than yours) I have yet to come upon even one person who refers to David Fletcher as ‘Fletch the Letch’. A catchy label, Andrew, but yet another of the many small (and not so small) untruths designed to present David Fletcher as ‘the villain’ – to be played opposite Scott Neeson’s ‘knight in shining armour’.

But I know lots of people are watching me so I am very careful about being seen with young girls.'

Yes, owing to the scuttlebutt perpetrated on Khmer440 by Peter Hogan, and within the NGO community generally by Scott Neeson, David Fletcher knew that he was being watched by numerous NGOs, including CEOPS – brought in by the British Embassy at the behest of Scott Neeson. At the time you published your article, (June 20^th  2010) none of those engaged in trying to find evidence of wrong-doing by Mr Fletcher had found any. There was no suggestion, when you spoke with Yang Dany and Kheang Sekun in June 2010, that David Fletcher had raped Dany 15 months earlier. And yet, a week later, (27^th June, 2010) Mr Fletcher was arrested in Bangkok and, eventually, charged with raping Dany in March 2009in a location (Rick’s Bar) that did not exist at the time!

Did this not strike you as odd? Did you not wonder what had changed in that fateful week?

By September 2010 you, Scott Neeson and all others involved in pursuing Fletcher, including the British Embassies in Cambodia and Thailand, were aware that Yang Dany remained a virgin after the alleged rapes; that she was a virgin. From this point on you were all, at the very least, complicit in what you knew to be a miscarriage of justice.

A conspiracy of silence!

Was there another conspiracy? And if so, who was involved? This is the subject of my film and book.

Fletcher was convicted at Norwich Crown Court  in July 1997 of the statutory rape of a 15-yr-old girl, whom he first plied with champagne and to whom he offered $250 cash. He also admitted possessing offensive weapons, two pepper sprays and two canisters of CS gas. He was jailed for eighteen months.

Judge David Mellor said at the time: 'You exploited a young girl with the lure of money and the disinhibitions of drink, then videoed what happened.'

You failed to mention in your article that Mr Fletcher was involved in an ongoing relationship with the girl in question and that she was a willing participant in the drinking, the sex and the video-taping.

Fletcher ran a series of hair salons in Cambridge and Saffron Walden.  But, after he left jail, he fled Britain. He says today: 'Britain is much too P.C. for me.  You can't do anything there. I'm never going back'.

To all intents and purposes Fletcher runs a charity in the Cambodian capital -The Garbage Dump Project. He has a website

http://volunteerproject.weebly.com/index.html  in which he tells the moving story of Phnom Penh's garbage dump kids and invites readers to send donations to his private bank account.

With the money, he says, he loads up a truck  or tuk tuk with food - ' US$1 can feed three children' - and heads out to the dump with his sponsors of the day.

The Sunday Mirror signed up for his tour and gave him US$50 to feed 150 children.  At a market we stopped to buy food and he bought bread baguettes, dragon fruit and tangerines.  We estimated he had handed over the sum of about US$30.

Fletcher was not a tactful negotiator. When he thought the price was too high he would extend an index finger to the seller and move on.

After all these years in South East Asia, Andrew, are you still unaware that bargaining is a form of theatre? That the extended finger, the frowning, she shaking of the head, the expressions of disbelief at the price offered, the walking away etc are all an integral part of the process of getting the best possible price. Here you clutch at straws in your attempts to blacken Fletcher’s character in any and every way you can.

When we asked him what the Khmer language word was for 'Sorry', Fletcher who has lived in Phnom Penh for six years, initially as a bar owner himself,  said he did not know.

But we were to find out later in the bars of Phnom Penh that he did however know the Khmer for 'no nickers' and 'oral sex'.

Fletcher denies saying this to you, Andrew. Produce the tape.

When we got to the garbage mountain at Stung Mean Chey on the outskirts of the capital he took a cream bun and some fruit to 'my favourite little girl' but she was not at home.  The girl, aged 8, we later learned had been rehoused with her family out of harm's way by the Cambodian Children's Fund.

In this instance, Andrew, given that you did not meet the girl and had only Neeson’s word to go on, you can be forgiven for reading what you have into ‘my favourite little girl’. I asked Fletcher about this. Here, unedited and uncorrected, is his response:

“All the families know i am a soft touch when it comes to children in distress ( aren't we all, except maybe some plebeians I know!) I was giving out food one day when a mother kept coming up to me pushing in the line and pulling my arm and pointing to a hut, I said I come soon, in my pidgin English, as I was short handed that day I could not stop, but would soon be finished, then I would see what the mother wanted. She was not giving up, she went off and quickly returned with a little girl in her arms, she was about ten years old, remember here it is so hard to judge ages, they are much smaller developed than in the western world. she was about the same size as my daughter was when she was about six. the mother carried the little girl to me so that I would look at her. She was smiling at me , so was thankfully not in pain as far as I could tell. And when these children smile at me, I am sunk! She had metal pins inserted all the way down one leg, all connected to a vertical steel rod on the exterior, she had obviously been in a horrendous accident. The mother explained that a car had hit her, they also showed me some terrible scars over her tummy, it had been a bad one. I photographed her injuries for future reference for my kind volunteers that came to Phnom Penh especially to help me help the children. She was healing well, and she had obviously had some good treatment getting her back together, it was obviously not Khmer work, so it must have been one of the more dedicated NGOs, so it proves me wrong, there are now three out here of the 3200 NGO units in Cambodia that follow through! One of the good ones is based in Thailand, so that only leaves two that I know of based in Cambodia that walk the walk!  Yes, I am being belligerent here, there is at least 5% of the NGOs that do some good work, wow!  I went up to the truck, brought back loads of goodies for her, of course lots of food, and every trip I made to the dump after that I went to see her with a cream cake or something she would never get otherwise, it was not only the food, but the attention to a brave little girl that had suffered badly, she deserved everything I could give her.

Sadly this story has a very ugly ending, when the sleaze journalist Andrew Drummond, he is on the net! Found out about this little girl, he made it into a 'oh this was one of Fletcher's little favorites, nudge nudge, wink wink, trying to make it all into a very unsavory agenda, again the gutter press excels itself and reaches the depths of depravity to sell newspapers. But as far as I am concerned, I made that little girls days a little better, and there were many of them, if you can achieve making one of these  children's day a little better, you have done something that child will always remember, and no better an epitaph! 

In this instance you have either been sloppy in believing unquestioningly what Neeson told you or, perhaps, this is merely you unable to resist the temptation to take yet another opportunity to blacken Fletcher’s name and reputation.

With his tuk-tuk driver he dished out fruit to long queues of children and then took us to his fiancee Yang Dany's home with a special bag of goodies for her mum.

'I'm planning to marry her when the time is right. Where can a man like me get a girl like this? I am going to get a loan to put her through University and educate her myself.

Produce the tape, Andrew. Yang Dany, her mother and Fletcher all deny telling you that Fetcher was going to marry Dany.

'This town is full of N.G.O's. There are over 3,000 different N.G.O's here. They are a pain in the butt; always making  trouble for someone or other, so I am especially careful.

'A couple of weeks ago I was attacked  by a foreigner with a pepper spray.  I keep a Bowie knife as protection now'.

This is true. I have spoken with a witness to this pepper spray attack. A Khmer  woman who works in a bank. She too was sprayed and injured during this attack. It was this attack, in conjunction with another, that led Fletcher to realize that he could stay in Cambodia no longer in June 2010.

After delivering our food and now back at our pick-up point the 'Phnom Penh India' restaurant on the city's riverside Sisowath Quay, Fletcher borrowed a receipt book from the owner and wrote out an official receipt for US$50. 'Everything's above board.  People have accused me of pocketing the charity money.

'It's a fine thing you have done today for the children of the garbage dump,' he said before heading off with the change and arranging to meet us in a bar later on to show us a 'good time'.

Later after meeting him at the Flora  hostess bar,  he took us to the nearby '99' hostess bar like many bars here full of young woman available for the taking at a price.

 'They can charge US$25 dollars upwards for sex.' said Fletch the letch, groping a girl, who said she was just 17, but whom  Fletcher claimed was 23.

'But I don't pay. I don't buy girls drinks. I give them tips. But I get sex for free anyway.  There is a girl who visits me from the local market in the morning. She just does it to have a nice shower and a comfortable bed to sleep in.  I prefer Cambodian girls. I tried Thailand first; went there for years to Patong Beach, Phuket,  but here it's much better. They're more needy.  You just need to be a little careful. I know I am being watched.  The schools have complained I am taking kids out of their classes. I just reply, 'Well you feed them properly then!'

Fletcher offered to take us to another bar. 'I've got a girl in there who I can really turn on.  She gets so worked up she should pay me. She's so small I can just lift her up and hang her on my ****. I don't use Viagra, I buy some much better Chinese made stuff from a shop around the corner,' he said.

That David Fletcher said such things to a journalist with a tape-recorder stretches credulity but your audio tape might prove otherwise.

But when we got there thankfully the bar was closed.

Fletcher used to run his 'Volunteer Project'  out of his former bar called 'Bogie and Bacall' but his two Australian colleagues quickly left.

Said one of them, retiree Ross Wright: 'We decided to go our own way. He never once showed us the bank account into which donations were going. There were tens of thousands of dollars unaccounted for.  Cash was coming in from Rotary Clubs and big private donors, but we never saw any of it.  We also had complaints of him being too familiar with young girls.'

Scott Neeson, 51, founded the Cambodian Children's Fund with the proceeds of his US$1 million a year salary in Hollywood as International President of Fox then International President for Marketing for Sony Pictures.

He quit, he says, after tiring of dealing with actors, particularly one famous one who raised hell when he was not supplied with a 'playstation' on a long haul flight. He had, he says, an epiphany. 'It was a rubbish life.

'But this is a rewarding , only people like Fletcher are a continuous source of worry .There is little doubt Fletcher devotes his time here to grooming young girls. He has nothing to do with the boys.  We have had girls of 13 and 14 turning up with his charity business cards. He had told their parents he wants to adopt them, care for them. They think, because he gives out food, he is good.  But he is grooming. They cannot see the other side.

No credible evidence has ever been presented that Fletcher was ‘grooming little girls’. If there was such evidence surely all those who were looking for it, in June 2010, when you wrote your article, would have found it! Along with evidence of Yang Dany’s rape 15 months earlier!

You were not to know it at the time, Andrew, but you were very foolish to believe unquestioningly everything Scott Neeson told you. Neeson has demonstrated to me on many occasions now that he plays fast and loose with the truth. Still, you could have done a little fact-checking before allowing Neeson to defame Fletcher and, in the process, defame him yourself.

'He also took a 14-yr-old into town without her parents permission, to go shopping.

'The fact is that these children can be bought. It's difficult to stop it. 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.'

Yes, Scott Neeson made sure, along with Peter Hogan, that the British Embassy knew about the allegations made by himself and Hogan – scuttlebutt unbacked up with evidence. It seems Neeson wanted to get rid of Fletcher, whom he saw as a competitor in the rubbish dump. As for Hogan’s motivations, the man saw the destruction of the reputations of others as a blood sport. Fletcher is not alone in being defamed by Hogan.

On June 20^th 2010 Fletcher was Yang Dany’s ‘boyfriend’, ‘fiance’, ‘future husband’ and ‘a good man’. A week later, a week after the publication of Scott Neeson’s ‘sent packing’ wish on 27^th June, Fletcher was arrested in Thailand. Yang Dany’s impoverished mother asked for $30,000 in compensation – this figure suggested to by an NGO she has identified in a filmed  interview with myself.

The abuse of children by foreigners in Cambodia is hampered by institutionalized corruption in what has become a one party state run by strongman Hun Sen, who has in effect locked out Opposition leader Sam Rainsy on trumped up charges.

Indeed, Andrew, ‘Cambodia is hampered by institutionalized corruption’. It is a country in which men and women are sent to jail on ‘trumped up charges’. If you had paid closer attention, if you had not been so keen to write a sensational story, it might have occurred to you that perhaps the charges made against Mr Fletcher were ‘trumped up’. Today, if the asking of further questions appealed at all, you might like to ask APLE why the NGO has pursued David Fletcher through the courts for four years despite knowing that Yang Dany was not raped by him or anyone else? You might like to ask APLE why, in Oct 2014, APLE is still telling Yang Dany and her mother that they can make $5,000 if they persist, in court, to insist that David Fletcher raped Dany? You might like to ask APLE why its lawyers have told their client not to be present in court on 20^th Oct to be cross-examined and why, it seems, that Yang Dany will not even be in Cambodia on that date?

Rainsy has been forced to live abroad after being sentenced to two years in absentia for creating a disturbance with boundary signs on the Cambodian border. He has accused Hun Sen of selling off parts of Cambodia.

Police have shown they are more than willing to take pay offs to release foreigners on child sexual abuse charges and most cases are settled with cash payments to one side or other.

But Britain's CEOP, Child Exploitation and Online Protection unit, have established a presence in the last two years and are linking progressively, they say, with Cambodian police.  A spokesman said: 'We are aware of complaints about David Fletcher and have been in discussion with the authorities.'

If you feel inclined to ask questions, Andrew, you might like to ask CEOPS if, in the course of its investigations, this NGO found any evidence at all that David Fletcher raped Yang Dany? On 20^th June 2010 Yang Dany was not telling CEOPS, yourself or anyone else that the had been raped. A week later she has changed her story. Which one is true? I think that the answer to this is to be found in the Sept 2010 medical report prepared for the court in which the examining doctor found Yang Dany’s hymen to be intact.

When I confronted Fletcher about his conviction against the 15-yr-old at Norwich Crown Court he said: 'Oh yes. She was just my girlfriend. They caught me. I just did it ahead of her sixteenth birthday. People will stoop very low to say bad things about me.'

Quite apart from setting the record straight by reporting the facts and not merely scuttlebutt, rumour and innuendo, if you were to re-visit this story you might find one much more interesting than the one that caught you attention when Scott Neeson and Peter Hogan brought it to your attention. You could start by asking of the British Embassy in Thailand which of the two versions of what happened to Mr Fletcher’s passport is the correct one and which the lie?