I have been having an e-mail correspondence with Jonathan King for the past nine months, and last night he e-mailed me to say, “I think you know, young Ronson, that whichever way it goes for me you could have an award-winning story here, if you’re brave. You can change the face of Great Britain if you do it well. Good luck! JK.”

I have just returned from New York, and in the canteen on the third floor of the Old Bailey—in the minutes before the trial is due to begin—Jonathan King comes over to make small talk about my trip.

“Did you bring me any presents back?” he asks. “Any small boys? Just kidding! Don’t you think it is amazing that I have retained my sense of humor?”

He smiles across the canteen at his arresting officers. They smile faintly back. Jonathan has always told me about his good relationship with the police, how kind they were to him during his arrest, and he looks a little crestfallen at their evident withdrawal of affection.

“The police are far less friendly than they were,” he says. “Quite boot-faced, in fact. And there doesn’t even seem to be a senior officer around. I’m getting quite insulted that I’m so unimportant that only constables are allowed anywhere near the case.”

He looks at me for a response. What should I say? Yes, his crimes are so significant and he is so famous that it would seem appropriate for a more senior officer to be in attendance? In the end, I just shrug.

There are half a dozen journalists here today covering the case. In the lobby outside the court, Jonathan approaches some to shake their hands. “Who’s the gorgeous blonde with a TV cameraman?” he whispers to me. “Sorry if this ruins my image.”

“I felt terrible about shaking his hand,” one reporter says a little later. “I felt disgusting. I was standing there thinking, ‘What’s he done with that hand?’ I should have refused to shake it.”

“I just asked my solicitor if it’s unusual for the accused to make a point of shaking the hands of the press and the prosecution barrister,” Jonathan says as we walk into court. “He said it was absolutely unheard-of!” Jonathan laughs, and adds, “You know, I fully intend to change the legal system just like I changed the pop industry.”

And at that, we take our seats. The jury is selected, and the trial begins.

•   •   •

ON NOVEMBER 24, 2000, Jonathan King was charged with three child-sex offenses dating back thirty-two years. In the light of the publicity surrounding his arrest, a dozen other boys (now men) came forward to tell police that King had abused them, too, during the seventies and eighties. Some said he picked them up at the Walton Hop, a disco in Walton-on-Thames run by his friend Deniz Corday. Others said he cruised them in his Rolls-Royce in London. He’d pull over and ask why they were out so late and did they know who he was. He was Jonathan King! Did they want a lift?

He told the boys he was conducting market research into the tastes of young people. Did they like his music? His TV shows? Were they fans of Entertainment USA, his BBC2 series? He asked them to complete a questionnaire—written by him—to list their hobbies in order of preference. Cars? Music? Family and friends? Sex? “Oh, really?” Jonathan would say to them. “You’ve only put sex at number two?”

And so they would get talking about sex. He sometimes took them to his Bayswater mews house, with its mirrored toilet and casually scattered photos of naked women on the coffee table. Sometimes he took them to car parks, or to the forests near the Walton Hop. He showed them photographs of naked Colombian air hostesses and Samantha Fox. He could, he said, arrange for them to have sex with the women in the photos.

Sometimes, within the bundle of photographs of naked women he would hand the boys, there would be a picture of himself naked. “Oh!” he’d say, blushing a little. “Sorry. You weren’t supposed to see that one of me!” (When the police raided King’s house, they say they found ten overnight bags, each stuffed with his seduction kit—his questionnaires and photos of Sam Fox and photos of himself naked—all packed and ready for when the urge took him to get into his Rolls-Royce and start driving around.)

He told the boys that it was fine if they wanted to masturbate. And then things would progress from there. Some of the boys reported that his whole body would start to shake as he sat next to them in the Rolls-Royce.

And then he “went for it,” in the words of one victim. None of the boys say he forced himself onto them. They all say they just sat there, awed by his celebrity. The boys all say that Jonathan King has emotionally scarred them for life, although almost all of them returned, on many occasions, and became the victims of more assaults.

Later, Jonathan King will spend his last weekend of freedom—the weekend before the guilty verdicts—recording for me a video diary of his feelings about the charges. At one point, midway through this twenty-minute tape, he hollers into the camera about this perplexing aspect of the case. “They kept coming back to me again and again and again, although this vile behavior was supposed to be taking place!” He laughs as if he’s delivering a funny monologue on some TV entertainment show. “Why on earth would anybody do that? I’d be out of that house as fast as I possibly could! I’d make damned sure I was never alone with that person again. Mad!”

When the police asked Jonathan why all these boys—who have never met or even spoken to each other—had almost identical stories to tell, he replied that he didn’t know. I am determined to ask at least one victim why he continually went back for more.

The defense argues that the police actively encouraged claims of emotional scarring when they interviewed the victims, because, without it, what else was there? Just some sex, long ago. The danger, says the defense team, is that if Jonathan is found guilty, the judge will sentence him not only for the acts themselves but also for the quantity of emotional scarring the victims claim to have. And how can that be quantified, especially in this age of the self, when the whole world seems to be forever looking to their childhoods for clues as to why they turned out so badly?

“Jonathan King,” says David Jeremy, the prosecution barrister, in his opening remarks to the jury, “was exploiting the young by his celebrity.”

When I first heard about King’s arrest, I looked back at his press interviews for clues, and found a quote he gave Music Week magazine in 1997: “I am a 15-year-old trapped inside a 52-year-old body.”

I talked to some of his friends from the pop industry, and one of them said, “Poor Jonathan. We were all doing that sort of thing back then.”

I attended an early hearing at Staines magistrates’ court. Jonathan King arrived in a chauffeured car. The windows were blacked out. Two builders watched him from a distance. As he walked past them and into the court, one of them yelled, “Fucking nonce!”

He kept walking. Inside, he noticed me on the press benches. We had appeared together on Talk Radio a few years ago and he recognized me. On his way out, he gave me a lavish bow, as if I had just witnessed a theatrical event, starring him. Outside, the builders were still there. They shouted, “Fucking nonce!” again.

My e-mail correspondence with Jonathan began soon after this hearing. In one e-mail, he asked me if I would consider it fair if, say, Mick Jagger was arrested today for having sex with a fifteen-year-old girl in 1970. I agreed that it wouldn’t be. He told me that he was being charged with the same crime that destroyed Oscar Wilde—the buggering of teenage boys—and we perceive Wilde to have been unjustly treated by a puritanical society from long ago. I wonder if the reason why we look less kindly upon Jonathan King is because he sang “Leap Up and Down (Wave Your Knickers in the Air),” while Oscar Wilde wrote De Profundis.