How Blaming Facebook And A Devon Paedo Ring Lets Jake Ormerod Off The Hook
JAKE Ormerod is the “ringleader of a teen gang which lured up to 139 vulnerable schoolgirls – some only 11 – into underage sex“. He chatted them up, and used drink and drugs to have unprotected sex with them.
He’s been jailed for ten years at Exeter Crown Court. The Mail said the girls were as youth as 12.
The Mail’s sister organ, the South Devon Herald Express, says:
‘Sexual predator’ Jake Ormerod (pictured right), 20, of Babbacombe Road, lured girls as young as 13 to his house to have sex with them.
11. 12. 13. Such are the facts. The 11-year-old has been interviewed by police. And that is all we know.
In court, Ormerod admitted 13 counts of engaging in sexual activity with eight girls aged 13-15.
The Sun tells us:
Ormerod, now 20, targeted vulnerable runaways and girls in foster care, hanging around school gates to pick them up and take them to his filthy flat, Exeter Crown Court was told.
Anorak has followed the case. The mainstream mead noticed Ormerod when in February 2011 the Daily Mail yelled:
“HOW MANY MORE CHILD VICTIMS OF FACEBOOK SEX GANG?”
A letter had been sent to 16,000 students at schools in Torquay, Paignton and Teignbridge. You can read it here.
The Mail made Facebook the enabler. Were the children ensnared on Facebook? Can you be trapped on a website that can be unplugged at the mains? Facebook cried foul. There was talk of Facebook suing the Mail. The website demanded an apology.
A spokeswoman for Facebook said:
“While the inaccurate headline was quickly changed online, the damage of being wrongly tied to this story on the front page is worthy of an apology – to both Daily Mail readers and Facebook – of equal prominence.”
The Mail refused. Now the paper tells us:
Facebook Sex Abuser Jake Ormerod Jailed
The Mail is cunning. That headline appears in the URL of the webpage. You click on it – and are confronted with a different headline:
Paedophile, 19, jailed for his part in ring that abused 139 victims as young as 11 in seaside tourist resort
Are there 139 victims? Dunno. The police say they have interviewed 139 young girls as part of the investigation. It’s tempting to think of them all as victims. But we don’t know that for sure. It might be just as likely many are friends of alleged victims, or children who were approached but never had sex. Such reporting turns a hideous story of child abuse and damaged lives into a scare story.
With the trial not begun, back February in the Mail introduced Ormerod to its readers thus:
Pictured surrounded by girls: Man, 19, charged following probe into internet predators grooming children for sex
Only, he wasn’t. In five photos Ormerod was with one “girl“. In another photo he was with a young man and two “girls”.
A reader wrote in to Anorak:
The Mail published pictures taken from Jakes FaceBook which were actually ( having seen them months ago) the normal sort of pictures that young people post of their friends and girlfrines. The Mail used emotive words such as ‘ grinning’ as if a smiling picture was somehow abnormal. They published many pictures of him with what we were intended to think were many girls…they were ALL pictures of his girlfriend whom he has always said he was in love with..with her face blanked out.
His mum said the “girl” was his lover. The lover was 23. Is that the age of a “girl”? Might such reporting have adversely affected the case?
What is certain is that Jake Ormerod is a predatory sex criminal. He is also an idiot:
He hit the local Devon news cycle in 2009, when he stole a mobile phone from the house of a taxi driver and, apparently, used it to call the victim’s firm to order a cab.
As we reported:
At Torquay Magistrates Court, he pleaded guilty to burglary and a charge of being a passenger of a vehicle taken without consent. He was due to be sentenced on July 20 2009. Prosecutor Alex Allsop told magistrates in Torbay, Devon, that Ormerod, from Torquay, should face at least 18 months in custody for the early-morning raid. Were this the same man, and had he have gotten the 18 months the prosecution demanded – and served the full term – he’d have been in jail up to December 2010. If the Mail wants to create a scare story, it could to worse than look at the alleged failings of the justice system.
The aforementioned local Devon paper now tells us:
A medical report said he has a mental age of 12-13, low IQ and borderline learning disabilities.
He is an idiot. But he still cunning and calculating enough to ensnare underage girls to have sex with him.
Local DI Simon Snell says:
“We believe there are 139 child victims in Torbay. The girls tend to go missing for two or three nights. This is not a case of abduction but their parents and carers don’t know where they are. They are attracted by alcohol and parties but end up being abused while at Ormerod’s home.”
The BBC reports:
During the court case Ormerod admitted one charge of sexual assault on a child, and 12 charges of sexual activity with a child – seven when he was aged under 18 and five when he was 18, over a three year period. The victim’s mother said: “I think she’s on the mend, but she’s been in a very dark place. She has had to revisit situations, emotions, thoughts about herself. I’m not advocating locking up your daughters, but we all need to be so vigilant and keep channels of communication. There’s only one person who’s responsible for this and that is the perpetrator, that is Jake Ormerod.”
Correct. Not Facebook. Not peer pressure in a paedo ring. Just one man seeking sex and not being bothered how he gets it…
Posted: 9th, July 2011 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
