MSP James Dornan reveals attempted murder charge as teenager after success of Netflix show Adolescence
An SNP MSP has revealed he was charged with attempted murder when he was 15 years old.
James Dornan, 72, said the incident still sticks to him "like a curse".
Speaking to The National newspaper, the politician said he was walking the streets of Battlefield in 1968 in the southside of Glasgow when one of his friends ran across the road and challenged two young boys.
He said he then ran over and punched one of the boys, who was later hit with a weapon by one of his friends, leaving him seriously injured.
His charge was later reduced to common assault and he received a £15 fine and two years' probation.
The MSP for Glasgow Cathcart said he decided to open up about the ordeal 57 years later due to the release of the hit Netflix drama Adolescence.
The series follows a 13-year-old boy arrested over the murder of a young girl and the impact it has on his family.
Mr Dornan said he has not watched the show, explaining: "I find this quite traumatic and very difficult emotionally to look at something that triggers things that have happened in my past, having just seen the clips.
"When you're a young man, you do things without thinking of the repercussions and then the repercussions just expand, and everyone is caught up in it.
"I didn't want to see two actors playing a very emotional role that I could see being my mum and dad.
"Stephen Graham is a magnificent actor. He acts with his heart, and I think that's why I would've found it very difficult. He reminds me of my dad."
Mr Dornan said he felt "shame and fear" following the incident.
He said: "The first bad bit was when my dad came down (to the police station) because my dad was straight as a die and this sort of thing was just awful.
"I felt shame and fear. I felt shame my mum would be suffering but also that my dad was going to have to go through this and at the same time I felt fear because I had no idea what was going to happen to me.
"I am now 57 years away from that incident and I still feel responsible for lots of things that have happened because of it, how people felt because of that incident.
"I don't think about it all the time but one of the problems I've got is I carry guilt about with me. It sticks with you like a curse. It never leaves you."
Mr Dornan praised the show's message around toxic masculinity.
He said: "It astounds me that we've now created a society where big sections think the denigration of women is acceptable behaviour.
"That's what I like about Adolescence. I hope it will engender the debate."
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mirror
42 minutes ago
- Daily Mirror
Desperate last moments of Rose West's victims confirmed by horror cellar finds
WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT Sadistic killers Fred and Rose West deliberately transformed their foul-smelling basement into a sordid sex dungeon, where they would carry out depraved acts against their victims Before killing their victims, Fred and Rose West would subject them to unthinkable abuse in the dark, dingy cellar that the depraved couple had transformed into their sex dungeon. Between the years 1967 and 1987, the Wests brutally tortured and slayed at least 12 vulnerable young women and girls at their Gloucestershire 'House of Horrors', 25 Cromwell Street. As detailed in the recent Netflix documentary, Fred and Rose West: A British Horror Story, after unearthing human remains from beneath the Wests' patio, the search expanded to inside the property, and in particular, the couple's foul-smelling basement. Janet Leach, who acted as an appropriate adult to Fred, accompanied the killer to the cellar where he marked out the burial sites to investigating officers. Speaking in the doc, she recalled: "When I went to sleep at night, I could smell it." It was here that, beneath the floor, further bodies were recovered. A disturbing picture of the victims' final moments began to emerge, with the remains showing signs that extreme sexual abuse had taken place prior to death. As was later noted in court, the scarf used to gag Thérèse Siegenthaler, one of the deceased, had been tied into a bow, in what was viewed to be a "feminine" touch. READ MORE: Fred and Rose West's hidden secrets - 'sex cult, paedo brother and more bodies' Investigators also discovered tools Fred and Rose had used to torture their victims, forensic psychologist Dr Julian Boon previously told The Guardian: "The thing that haunted me the most was a mask that had nothing but two nose holes, so the person could breathe but couldn't see or hear. As a consequence, they could have anything done to them, and that is very frightening." Although mere minutes away from a busy shopping centre, the side entrance of 25 Cronwell Street and the lack of street lighting meant victims could be lured in without attracting notice. Criminal profiler, Dr Paul Britton, said: "These aren't people who looked like predatory psychopaths, they looked ordinary. Their activities were out of plain sight. They were able to take their victims, bind them, gag them, break their teeth. "They were able to put tubes into them to keep them alive for days and suspend them from hooks because of the nature of the building. They were shielded, and no one knew what was happening." Fred died by suicide on New Year's Day, 1995, taking with him to his grave many of the dark secrets of what happened in that cellar. The following autumn, Rose stood trial alone at Winchester Crown Court, where prosecutor Brian Leveson asserted: "[The victims'] last moments on earth were as objects of the sexual depravity of this woman and her husband". Rose, now 71, pleaded not guilty to the harrowing charges and attempted to paint herself as a wife who'd been tricked by her husband's duplicity, having had no clue that her home had become a graveyard. Her version of events ultimately did not convince the jury, and she was sentenced to life imprisonment. Meanwhile, in life, diabolical Fred had a warped view of what had unfolded, making the following comment during his police interview: "Yeah, see, you've got the killing all wrong, no, nobody went through hell, enjoyment turned to disaster, well, most of it anyway." Sadly, many of those who fell victim to the Wests' sadism lie dead and buried, unable to tell their stories, but there are those whose shocking accounts shed light on what these vulnerable girls and women were subjected to in their final hours. Giving evidence during the trial of Rose, Caroline Owens wept as she recalled how she had been seized by the Wests, who gagged her with tape, bound her and took her to Cromwell Street. It was here where was raped and sexually assaulted. Caroline had initially been offered a job as nanny to the Wests' children, but quit after just five or six weeks, going back to live with family in Cinderford, Gloucestershire. However, in the winter of 1972, she ended up back in their clutches after they lured her back into their car, beginning a vicious 12-hour ordeal that left her fearing for her life. Speaking from the dock during the trial, Caroline recalled: "I think that is when Fred said 'what are her t*** like?'. She started to grab hold of me grinning and laughing, not a nice laugh. Then she started to grab me between the legs. He pulled up and turned round in his seat and we were struggling with each other and I was trying to get her off and he turned round and started punching me and calling me names like 'b****'." It was then that she was knocked unconscious. She continued: "When I came round, my arms had been tied behind my back with a scarf and they had tape around my head all the way round my mouth and the back of my head. It was a gag. Rose was holding me, and Fred was putting the tape around." Thankfully, the then 16-year-old managed to flee the House of Horrors, and went on to make a police report. The pair were charged with indecent assault. Caroline's testimony ultimately proved crucial in putting Rose West behind bars. She later went on to detail her ordeal in the books The Lost Girl and The One That Got Away.
Daily Mail
2 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Maniac killed and dismembered 19-year-old college student on their first date
A Wisconsin man killed and dismembered a 19-year-old college student on their first date after watching a Netflix show that depicted an eerily similar mutilation. Maxwell Anderson was convicted of homicide and dismembering a corpse for the horrific killing of Sade Robinson on April 1, 2024 - just days after the two met at a bar. The pair had spent the late afternoon and early evening of the fateful date at two bars before going back to Anderson's apartment. At one point, Anderson turned on the Netflix series "Love, Death & Robots." The finale of Season 2 is an episode called 'The Drowned Giant' which shows a gruesome dismantling of a human body on a beach. Prosecutors in the case claimed that Anderson mutilated Robinson's body on a Wisconsin beach overlooking Lake Michigan. 'I was like... that's disgusting because that could have been where he got some of his ideas or fantasies,' juror Melissa Blascoe told the Milwaukee-Journal Sentinal. 'I physically felt like I was gonna throw up at that point. I know a lot of people were shaking and crying.' Anderson was also charged with arson and hiding a corpse in connection with her death. He was found guilty on all counts. Investigators said that Anderson is believed to have spread her remains around Milwaukee County and burned her car to hide evidence. Anderson and Robinson had met at a bar a week before she disappeared, Assistant District Attorney Ian Vance-Curzan said. Disturbing images showed Robinson being groped by Anderson while she lay face down on his couch, and prosecutors said she was far too incapacitated to have resisted. Surveillance video showed Robinson's car leaving the apartment in the early hours of April 2 before arriving at a county park along Lake Michigan shores. The young student's disappearance sparked concern when she didn't appear for work the next day. Her manager, Justin Romano, told CNN that Robinson was 'very outgoing, she would talk to everybody here. She was always there to lighten the mood.' Romano said her not showing up for work 'wasn't like her at all,' and added: 'We kind of knew something was up; we had been calling her all day.' Anderson is believed to have dismembered her body into pieces and burned her car behind an abandoned building before taking a bus back to his apartment, Vance-Curzan said. Within the car, despite 'extreme fire damage,' investigator's identified the outfit Robinson had been wearing on the night of the date as well as part of an iPhone consistent with hers burned in the car, CNN reported. Police then were called to Warnimont Park where a human leg, that appeared to have been 'sawn off' at the hip, was discovered. The leg was then identified as Robinson's. A 'confidential informant' claimed that Anderson had planned to kill Robinson weeks prior to her death, Fox News reported. Anderson's attorney, Tony Cotton, argued, however, that the prosecution showed no evidence of Anderson's intention to kill Robinson. Cotton also pointed out he made no attempt to conceal himself on public transport home, and was wearing clean clothes despite having allegedly cut up her body in a muddy park. Jurors reached their verdict within an hour on the ninth day of trial. 'While we are satisfied with this verdict, our hearts go out to the family of Sade Robinson,' Vane-Curzan said, Fox News reported. Milwaukee County Sheriff's Det. JoAnn Donner spent months working on the case and said: 'My heart goes out to the family and [Robinson's] friends and really, the community at large. 'It's everyone's come together, and it's really hard to take that step back as a law enforcement officer and not get that really emotionally involved during the case,' she continued. 'I will admit that I did go back to my office after the verdict, and I had a good cry because I finally got to have that emotion. It does affect us too.' Robinson's mother, Sheena Scarbrough, said in a GoFundMe for her daughter's memorial service that Robinson was a 'loving daughter, a cherished sister, and a dear friend to many.' 'The pain of losing Sade has left a void in the hearts of her family, especially her grieving mother and little sister, along with other relatives, friends and the entire community who loved and supported her,' the fundraiser said. Anderson is set for sentencing on August 15, where he faces a mandatory life sentence in prison.
Daily Mail
11 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Booze, wood-burners, Sunday roasts... as the list of everyday pleasures targeted by the SNP grows longer, have we EVER been subjected to a more censorious nanny state government?
They've clobbered smokers. Thought – aloud – about criminalising the ownership of cats. Its Fife panjandrums are now leaning on local chippies to slash portion-sizes – in the averred interests of public health: now, SNP surrogates threaten your Sunday roast. The ink had barely dried on the first Scottish Parliament minutes before that first cohort of MSPs had banned fox-hunting and hare-coursing. Passed a whole Act about dog-fouling. Our underemployed, overwaged legislators are still after anyone gasping for a fag - in the latest wheeze, you can now be prosecuted for puffing within fifteen metres of a hospital boundary, even if you are on the other side of the street. Disposable vapes are in their sights too: for years it has been an offence to vape at any Scottish railway station, even on a platform in the open air. No pleasure seems safe from the Nats, from their fatuous efforts to police football chants – indeed, the initial law was so intrusive, and so unworkable, it had to be abandoned. Forget that soothing drink, by the way. 'Minimum pricing,' whacked up again last year, means you're now shelling out more for a litre of sherry than, back in 1999, you had to hand over for a bottle of Famous Grouse. Our English neighbours enjoy cheaper beer than we do. And now the Nats have a real new beef with us. The Scottish Government's Climate Change Committee, wagging a sententious finger, says we should all be eating 30 per cent less red meat. And that farmers – as if they did not have trials enough, with scant profit-margins and over-weening bureaucracy in one of Scotland's loneliest jobs – should rear a third fewer sheep and cattle. Even that shocker has had to jostle for attention with other ridiculous headlines. NHS Fife, for instance, is leaning on the hot takeaway trade to cut the typical portion of, for instance, fish and chips. And the Scottish Animal Welfare Commission suddenly has anglers in its crosshairs. Fishing practices should be reformed, it drones, as fish are 'sentient beings' with 'emotional experiences that matter to them.' It hopes ministers will soon review the law regarding 'actions that occur in the normal course of fishing.' Such a move, panted one newspaper and as if it had just unmasked Lord Lucan, 'could outlaw many aspects of angling such as hooking a fish and removing it from the water.' SAWC does, admittedly, have form. Only in February, it thought about forbidding cat ownership in parts of the country where there was demonstrable predation on birds and small mammals. It would make still more sense to shoot every last bird of prey out of the sky and, if SAWC wants a rough guide, between 1837 and 1840 gamekeepers in forested Invergarry killed 285 common buzzards, 63 goshawks, 27 white-tailed sea eagles, 15 golden eagles and 18 ospreys. Not to mention six gyrfalcons, eleven hobbies, 275 kites, 371 rough-legged buzzards, 462 kes-trels, 78 merlins, 63 hen harriers and seven orange-legged falcons. The First Minister, of less stern stuff, limply assured the public that the SNP administration had no plans to ban pet cats. Last year, too, the Nationalists were even forced to abandon a crazed scheme to ban wood-burning stoves in new-build houses. It feels increasingly as if you cannot take three strides in what one of John Swinney's predecessors once hailed as 'the best small country in the world' without being lectured, harangued, re-proached and disapproved of. Tobacco, sugar, booze, salmon or that jumbo-sausage supper… ministers have their beady little eyes on us. And, no doubt, others have eyes on them too. It is only fair to point out that this culture of censure, rebuke and righteously rapped knuckles long predates the SNP's 2007 ascent to power. From practically the start, the devolved new Scotland rapidly won much wry comment for eat-your-vegetables nanny statism. After the first MSPs had solemnly voted themselves a com-memorative medal. In 2005, for instance, Nora Radcliffe – Liberal Democrat MSP for Gordon, till Alex Salmond toppled her from obscurity into oblivion – called for a ban on the boiling of live lobsters. The Scottish Executive, as it then was, pelted us with posters and raucous TV ads about the horrors of everything from eating too many crisps, through dodgy electric blankets, to the enormity of consigning your Christmas turkey to the fridge before it was completely cold. And, in April 2006 and to widespread trepidation – many journalists hurried up from England, hoping for riots on the streets – Jack McConnell's administration banned smoking in enclosed public spaces. A policy, in fact, first suggested by a Nationalist MSP, Stewart Maxwell. But Scots submitted to it so meekly that one wonders how much it emboldened another First Minister, fourteen years later, to impose all sorts of ridiculous restrictions on our liberties during Covid. At its height, you could not sit down on a park bench, enjoy coffee with a neighbour in your garden or leave your house more than once a day. It was even decreed an offence to venture beyond the bounds of your own local authority. When I in March 2021 had briefly to scamper back to my Hebridean lair, by deserted roads through silent towns, for an armful of Astra-Zeneca, I was so terrified of being stopped and challenged I carried a sort of letter-of-transit from my GP. Meanwhile, our unfortunate children shuffled down school corridors in sweaty masks as – concerned about classroom ventilation – ministers wondered aloud about sawing the bottoms off doors and Nicola Sturgeon tut-tutted that Prince William dared to visit Scotland. Behind this are two dark realities. The first is that, while finally responsible for a host of public services, the Scottish Government (and, by extension, the Scottish Parliament) delivers virtually none of them. Local authorities school most of our children; local health-boards direct primary care and hospitals, and so on. When it finally did have an immediate and grave responsibility, from the dawn of 2021 – vaccinating the elderly and the vulnerable against coronavirus – the Scottish Government made such a laboured fist of things that, quietly and with the deepest tact, Whitehall sent in the army. The second reality is that there is a very old middle-class tradition in Scotland of censuring working-class pleasures. In an era when, for most ordinary people, Sunday was their only day off, clergy insisted on the shuttering of galleries and museums. In a noted Court of Session case – with consequences, generations later, for the Western Isles – it was finally ruled that the good and respectable folk of Burntisland, most conscious of their goodness and respectability, could not ban the Sabbath visits of excursion steamers. In 1875 the Religion and Morals Report for the Free Church General Assembly railed that, to a large extent, 'our farm servants are ignorant, licentious, profane and rude'. What yokels might have thought of Free Church ministers is not recorded. Meanwhile, Presbyterians grew so obsessed with the demon drink that, by the Great War, many congregations celebrated Communion with non-alcoholic wine. And, in 1907, a United Free Church minister assailed a new social phenomenon as 'perfect iniquities of Hell itself,' capped in Glasgow Corporation's 1909 roar about 'the great and increasing evil' it was doing to the city's young men and women. Business ventures 'owned by 'aliens and Roman Catholics,' touting an unnecessary product 'epitomising,' gasped one gentleman, 'the evil of luxury being smuggled into the souls of Glaswegians.' The target of such ire? Italian ice cream cafés. As if not to be outdone, the Free Presbyterian Magazine warned young Highland lasses, seeking urban employment, of the perils of the white-slave trade. They should not, for instance, accept sweets from strangers. Retreating from such past larks to the latest decrees from those with the rule over us, it is striking how few stand up to logical examination. Take the Scottish Climate Committee's clamour for less beef and fewer cows; the reduced bleating of sheep. This is presumably pegged to three core tenets of tree-hugging faith: that reduced upland grazing will in scant decades see the regeneration of much Scottish forest; that cattle-feed is a wildly inefficient use of grain; and that cows, naturally flatulent, are responsible for about 14.5 per cent of global greenhouse gases. The precise figure is, in fact, disputed. But the Committee's lordly loftiness flies in the face of basic realities. For one, about 65 per cent of all the land in Britain can bear nothing but grass. Cows and sheep – hold the front page – eat grass. We cannot. Our cloven-hooved stock will, accordingly, be an essential part of our food economy till the end of time, and the beef industry in particular has for years been working hard to reduce its carbon footprint. For another, much of upland and coastal Scotland is too high – or too exposed to salted winds – to bear significant woodland. Life in somewhere like Lewis or Tiree is, as someone once said with feeling, like living on the deck of an aircraft-carrier. Snow can fall on Ben Nevis in any calendar month of the year. And, even were it otherwise, the Climate Change Committee seems to be blithely unaware of the real menace: deer. The deer population on Britain, as Patrick Galbraith details in his rather good book about Brit-ain's vanishing birds - In Search of One Last Song - is completely out of control: two million beasts on the trot, the highest in a thousand years. The ideal on a well-managed Scottish estate is five deer per square kilometre – on some, numbers are at an unsustainable twenty per kilometre. The depredations of muntjac alone have wiped out the nightingale in many parts of England. Deer threaten the survival, too, of black grouse, ptarmigan and the capercaillie. They are, additionally, responsible for many fatal road-accidents; and there is no more ferocious foe of forest than browsing Bambi. But households remain reluctant to buy and cook venison – and, absurdly, much of the venison for sale in Britain today is imported. In any event, most of us eat less red meat these days, not least because it is so expensive: you will struggle to buy a family-sized pot-roasting cut for less than a tenner. And in the Hebrides, well within living memory, it was a rare treat: fish and potatoes all week, with meat (and the related broth as the first course) on Sundays. There are other environmental realities that seem to have eluded the Climate Change Committee. Without cattle, as the Royal Agricultural Society of England has pointed out, 'there would be no dung, which would vastly reduce the presence of dung beetles in their habitat. 'As well as delivering a myriad of ecosystem benefits, such as sequestering carbon into the soil, dung beetle larvae are a key food source for ground-nesting birds. It is estimated that dung beetles save farmers in the UK £367 million per year…' Then we have that NHS Fife obsession: how big is your fish supper? In fact, fish and chips – cooked properly and well – is a remarkably healthy meal. There is, for instance, no added sugar. It is rich in Omega-3 fatty acids, vitamins B12 and D, and high-quality protein – and less fat than a typical serving of, say, chicken tikka masala or an oil-slicked Chinese takeaway. 'Typically,' assures one authority, 'fish and chips on average have 9.42 grams of fat per 100 grams, while the average pizza has 11, chicken korma 15.5 and a donner kebab a whopping 16.2…' We come to SWAC's vapourings about angling. One rather doubts such solicitude extends to every creature of the earth. Even the Commission's august personages doubtless prefer life without headlice, tapeworms and rats and most, presumably, vaccinate their children. It remains official NatureScot advice to smash dead any American signal crayfish you meet in our fresh waters and, for over two decades, it has been determinedly exterminating feral mink in the Western Isles. Where SWAC may have a point is the dubious practice of 'catch and release.' My own view is that you should only venture out with the rod for fish you can eat and, having caught your salmon and thumped it on the head, you head for home and the deep freeze, rather than hauling in fish after fish, weighing them, measuring them, taking a few snaps for social media and then returning them to the deep. Not forgetting a protracted chat about emotional experiences that really mattered to them. But, in coarse fishing, catch and release is the whole point: we might, perhaps, command barbless hooks, or even the soluble sort decreed in the pursuit of bluefin tuna. The wild Atlantic salmon may not always be with us; the typical Scottish political animal will add to the gaiety of nations for decades to come. Bossy, virtue-signalling, carefully picking its targets, and unconsciously living what Ronald Reagan once mocked as the prevalent tenets in modern statecraft. If it moves, tax it; if it keeps moving, regulate it – and, if it stops moving, subsidise it.
