Perverted Lives of the Rich and Famous > Mason Greenwood Breaches bail, goes to jail; Hedley's Hoggard gets 5 years

..

Mason Greenwood, 21, will spend a month behind bars after he was denied bail over attempted rape and assault charges

Holly Christodoulou, Richard Moriarty

9:34, 17 Oct 2022, Updated: 16:41, 17 Oct 2022

MASON Greenwood will spend more than a month behind bars after he was today denied bail over attempted rape, assault and coercive control charges.

The Man Utd striker, 21, has already been held in custody for two nights after he was charged on Saturday.

Mason Greenwood is appearing in court today. Credit: PA

Greenwood will now be remanded until his next court appearance on November 21 at Minshull Street Crown Court.

The footballer was today denied bail at Greater Manchester Magistrates' Court, where he was supported by his family. His alleged victim was also seen being supported by a female pal as she sat outside the courtroom.

The alleged offences relate to one woman and are said to have taken place between November 1, 2018, and October 15, 2022.

Greenwood is accused of "repeatedly engaging" in controlling and coercive behaviour for almost four years - including making threats and derogatory comments on social media.

He is also charged with attempting to rape her on October 21, 2021. Greenwood also allegedly assaulted her between December 12, 2021, and December 31, 2021. Attempted rape carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment if convicted.

Police swooped on the footballer's £15,000-a-month rented home in Trafford on Saturday. He was held on suspicion of being in contact with his alleged victim in a breach of his bail conditions. He spent three nights in custody after he was arrested at his luxury rented home.

The Crown Prosecution then authorised Greater Manchester Police to charge the footballer. The striker has been waiting to discover his fate since he was first held in January this year.

Greenwood was bailed on February 2 and has been keeping a relatively low profile since. He was originally due to answer his bail on April 30 but the decision was pushed back after a court hearing in June.

At the time, the striker was suspended by Utd but still received his £75,000-a-week salary.

The club released a statement yesterday after Greenwood's charge was announced.

A spokesperson said: "Manchester United notes that criminal charges have been brought against Mason Greenwood by the Crown Prosecution Service. "He remains suspended by the club, pending the outcome of the judicial process.”

Greenwood was removed from FIFA 22 and dropped by sponsors Nike in the wake of the allegations. Football Manager 2022 has also confirmed he will not feature in the game. All merchandise bearing the No11's name has been axed from the official Utd site and teammates have unfollowed him on Instagram.

Greenwood’s promising domestic and international career remains in jeopardy. He last played for the Red Devils on January 22 when the team beat West Ham 1-0.

The player joined the team aged just six and rose through the ranks to land himself a regular spot on the first team. In 2019, he became the youngest footballer to play for Utd in the Champions League when he took to the pitch aged 17.

Greenwood has made 129 appearances in total for the Red Devils and netted 35 goals. In 2020, England manager Gareth Southgate gave the striker his first cap when Greenwood came off the bench in a 1-0 win against Iceland.

Hedley frontman Jacob Hoggard sentenced to 5 years in prison

By Liam Casey  The Canadian Press

Posted October 20, 2022 4:03 am

Updated October 20, 2022 3:24 pm

Canadian musician Jacob Hoggard was sentenced to five years behind bars on Thursday in the sexual assault of an Ottawa woman, an offence the presiding judge called a “particularly degrading rape.”

In delivering her sentence in a downtown Toronto courtroom, Ontario Superior Court Justice Gillian Roberts said Hoggard’s offence involved “gratuitous degradation” and “gratuitous violence.”

“It is no exaggeration to say that (the woman) is no longer the same person she was before the attack. She was physically hurt … far more significant was the psychological hurt,” Roberts said.

“Whatever fleeting moments of gratification Mr. Hoggard derived from his conduct, they have come at the staggering and utterly unacceptable cost of forever changing (the woman’s) life.” 

The judge said she accepted the woman’s evidence “in its entirety.”

The 2016 sexual assault took place in a Toronto hotel room and the Ottawa woman told Hoggard’s sentencing hearing that what happened will haunt her for the rest of her life.

The judge accepted as fact that Hoggard raped the woman multiple times anally, vaginally and orally, choked her, spit on her, called her a slut and a pig and oinked at her like an animal.

The Crown had sought a sentence of six to seven years — above the normal range for a sexual assault by someone with no criminal record, court heard. The prosecution argued Hoggard was a risk to the public.

Swedish Feminists Up in Arms Over ‘Dangerous’ Sex Robot Brothels

Robot brothels have already opened in Finland and Denmark

Every day the world finds a way to make itself more vulgar with astonishing creativity, often to the applause of the politically correct world. It is good to see some of that PC world, feminists, are standing against this new form of sexual perversion, at least in Sweden, at least in the absence of condemnation from churches and governments.

FILE PHOTO: A robot at a European sex doll brothel © Global Look Press via ZUMA Press

With sex robot brothels popping up across Europe, Swedish feminists are on the ‘war path’ with the potential practice on Swedish soil. They claim such android sex workers promote “dangerous” attitudes towards women.

Writing in the Expressen newspaper on Wednesday, the heads of three Swedish feminist organizations argued that the appearance and attributes of today’s sex robots bore the same “objectifying, sexualized and degrading attitude” that was found in mainstream pornography.

The organizations behind the letter were the Sweden’s Women’s Lobby, the National Organisation for Women’s Shelters and Young Women’s Shelters (Roks), and Unizon, a women’s empowerment group.

Talking about “dangerous” dehumanization, they argued that the female robots lacked any agency when it came to dealing with the requests of male clients. They also warned that the “type of fantasies” made possible by the opening of sex robot brothels would lead to real violence against women.

The activists are now calling for the Swedish government to implement a series of measures that would make it difficult for such a brothel to open in Sweden. Similar brothels have already opened for business in neighboring Finland and Denmark. 

As technology advances to create more lifelike sex dolls, debate has raged over the legal and ethical questions regarding prostitution laws and violence towards women in several jurisdictions. Plans by a US entrepreneur to open such a brothel in Texas saw him label it as a sex robot “showroom” in a bid to dodge regulators. That aside, a franchise of The Dolls Hotel in Torino, Italy was shut down after only nine days for what authorities claimed was “a lack of hygiene.”

It's obvious that governments are unable to deal with this issue directly - on a moral basis. Immorality, it seems, can only be addressed tangentially. We simply cannot refuse to permit something just on the basis that it is wrong, sick, disgusting, and immoral. It will not always be that way.

Can India Ban Pornography Completely?

Soutik Biswas
Delhi correspondent
BBC India

Kamlesh Vaswani says pornography is a "moral cancer" which hurts India's future

On his many trips to Internet cafes in the bustling central Indian city of Indore, lawyer Kamlesh Vaswani discovered what he calls the "epidemic" of pornography.

"I would go to download important Supreme Court judgements, and pornographic adverts would pop up instead. And when I looked around, I saw rows of children surfing porn openly without a care in the world," says Mr Vaswani, 43, a quiet man with a probing look.

He says he went to the local court and discussed it with his colleagues. "They were also saying that porn was everywhere around us. Something had to be done about it."

What shook him up further, he says, was the fatal gang rape of a 23-year-old Indian student in Delhi in December 2012. The attack caused international outrage and prompted India to introduce stringent anti-rape laws.

Mr Vaswani had been in Delhi on some work on the day of the incident, and he says he felt "guilty" that he couldn't do anything to avert the crime. He believed that the attackers must have been watching porn.

Controversial plea

"Why are the youth failing India? Because they are drowning in porn," he says.

He also believes that India's GDP could be increased if people were discouraged from watching porn.

"People watch porn, and become selfish. They don't want to give back to the nation," he says.

Three winters ago, Mr Vaswani began writing a public interest petition to the Supreme Court, making a controversial case for a ban on Internet porn. Confined to home to look after his ailing father, he wrote up the 200-page, 20,000-word plea on his laptop in a month's time.

The top court - to his surprise, he says - admitted the petition and heard it on April 2013.

Since then, Mr Vaswani's petition has acquired a life of its own: earlier in August, it was responsible for the government's rather ham-handed decision to block free access to 857 porn sites, which was swiftly lifted following outrage over the move. Mr Vaswani has attended nearly 20 hearings related to the case in a little more than two years.

Mr Vaswani's wife Rinki is a school teacher and son Jyotirmaya is a student

The petition seeks a ban on all sites showing porn, and calls for "new, exhaustive anti-pornography laws"

Mr Vaswani's petition says that pornography is "worse than Hitler, worse than Aids, cancer or any epidemic. It is more catastrophic than nuclear holocaust, and it must be stopped".

Many would call the petition's words extreme - or paranoid. And many in India have argued against a ban on pornography - arguing that this would restrict civil liberties.

However, Mr Vaswani is adamant that pornography makes people selfish and unproductive.

His petition also argues that watching porn "puts the country's security in danger, encourages violent acts, unacceptable behaviour in society, exploitation of children and lowers the dignity of women".

Mr Vaswani's efforts led the government to temporarily ban hundreds of sites

Mr Vaswani, the son of a government worker and a homemaker mother, grew up in a middle-class joint family. He went to two schools, including a convent.

He says he failed to clear the highly competitive medical examinations five times, dashing his hopes of becoming a doctor. He then moved between various career choices: he picked up a degree in science, wanted to pick up one in arts, and then settled for a career in law. He has been a practising lawyer for more than a decade now.

I met Mr Vaswani at his home in Indore, an unkempt city, bristling with shops and lawyers.

He lives with his teacher wife and his school-going son in an austere two-bedroom apartment in a grotty, 35-year-old multi-storeyed building. The pale pink walls of the sitting room were adorned with a religious painting and another of his guru, while a book on criminal law and the Hindu holy book Bhagvad Gita lay on a small bed flanked by a TV set.

Fellow travellers

Mr Vaswani describes himself as "an ordinary lawyer".

"I am grateful to the top court for admitting my petition. My next public interest litigation will demand cheap and affordable treatment for cancer," he says. It is a tribute to his father who died of cancer last year.

Mr Vaswani has been joined by some fellow travellers in his journey to banish porn.

One of them is Atul Gupta, a 40-year-old electronics engineer and an alumnus of the prestigious Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Science, who lives near Delhi. Mr Gupta has been going to schools and people's homes for years installing filters and blocking porn sites. Last year, after reading about Mr Vaswani's petition in the papers, he got in touch with him and offered him help, telling him that the technology was available to block sites.

"I think porn is like drugs. It needs to be banned," says Mr Gupta.

Then there is Suresh Shukla, a 37-year-old chemical engineer from top engineering school Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), who now runs a company based in the holy town of Varanasi selling anti-pornography solutions and filters.

He provided the list of 857 "high traffic, verified sites" to the government, which led to the sites being blocked briefly. The number of sites classed as porn by his company has now swelled to more than 200,000, he says.

At his company, he says, women researchers and employees "enjoy the veto power" over men, in categorising certain "non-explicit" sites like joke and cartoon sites, as porn. "This is not about Mr Vaswani, this is about a larger battle," he says.

Suresh Shukla runs a company selling pornography blocking solutions

Last week, the government told the Supreme Court at a hearing of Mr Vaswani's petition that although child pornography must be banned, "we cannot be present in everyone's bedroom".

Was this a setback to his campaign, I asked.

"Not at all. The government is trying to divert the issue and make it one about invasion of privacy. This is not about privacy, this is about saving India," he said, sounding confident.

"I am confident that the court will overrule objections and ban porn."

I asked him whether he was being too optimistic.

"It will happen sooner than you think," he said. "Maybe in four-five months."

How likely is that? If there was outrage at banning 857 sites, what kind of reaction would there be to banning 200,000?

I applaud the goal though. I also believe pornography is detrimental to society and women in particular. I believe there is a direct correlation between pornography available to adolescent boys and the culture of rape that exists in so many North American universities. I believe it is horribly degrading to women, society in general, and the men who would become the next generation of leaders.

I hope and pray that India will lead the way in what has to happen if modern society is going to survive.