Latest news with #Winterson
Wales Online
7 days ago
- Wales Online
Paedophile pretended to be teenager on TikTok to groom 10-year-old girl
Paedophile pretended to be teenager on TikTok to groom 10-year-old girl The 34-year-old bakery worker told the child she was pretty and sent her a picture of his genitals Thomas Winterson (Image: Gwent Police ) A paedophile groomed a 10-year-old girl he met on TikTok before sending her a picture of his penis, a court has heard. An investigation into that matter led police to finding Thomas Winterson had hundreds of videos of child sexual abuse which he had shared with a like-minded individual, and had visited Russian websites known for hosting indecent images. Newport Crown Court heard the 34-year-old defendant has a previous conviction for possessing indecent images for which he was given a community order. The bakery worker's barrister told the court Winterson had voluntarily sought help from a charity which works with sex offenders and was motivated to change. The court heard that Winterson's behaviour came to light after he contacted a 10-year-old girl in the north of England on the video-sharing app TikTok. Pretending to be a 15-year-old boy, the defendant told the child she was pretty and asked if they could chat on Snapchat, offering her money for the popular online game platform Roblox. The court heard that once on Snapchat Winterson asked the girl for pictures - the girl sent him some photos of herself and he responded by sending her pictures of his erect penis. The girl called Winterson a "paedophile" and told her mother who in turn reported the matter to police. The court heard that the defendant was identified via the phone number linked to his TikTok account and officers subsequently attended at his house to arrest him and seize his electronic devices. For the latest court reports sign up to our crime newsletter An examination of Winterson's phone and his online Mega storage account uncovered more than 800 indecent images - the vast majority being videos - including 220 classified as Category A which show the most extreme forms of sexual abuse and rape. The children in the images were aged from around 12 months up to teenagers, and most of the images were in a hidden folder on the iPhone. An image involving "intercourse with a sheep" was also found. Article continues below The court heard the examination of the phone also revealed Winterson had been chatting to someone who went by the name "Evil Mouse" and that the defendant had sent the contact a link to his Mega storage account and had discussed "trading" images. The examination of the defendant's iPhone additionally revealed he had been visiting a Russian website known for hosting child sexual abuse images. Read about a sex offender who carried out detailed surveillance of local children including mapping their movements to and from school Thomas Winterson, of Rhymney Close, Ebbw Vale, had previously pleaded guilty to causing a child to see a sexual act, three counts of possessing indecent images of Categories A, B, and C, three counts of distributing indecent images of Categories A, B, and C and to possessing extreme pornography when he appeared in the dock for sentencing. He has two previous convictions four three offences including possessing indecent images from 2018 for which he was sentenced to a community order and made the subject of a sexual harm prevention order. Meabh McGee, for Winterson, said the defendant had told her that at the time of the offending he was "in a very low place" after someone to knew had shared details of his previous offending. She said the defendant had voluntarily sought help from the Lucy Faithful foundation and now had a range of "tools" he can use in his life including limiting the amount of time he spends online and engaging with mental health groups. She said her client has a job in a bakery and has stable accommodation and that he hopes to re-establish contact with his son but realises "he has a lot of work to do before that can happen" Article continues below Judge Eugene Egan said Winterson had groomed a child he had met on TikTok before sending her a picture of his erect penis, something which had caused "huge upset". He said an investigation into that matter led police to finding indecent images, and he told the defendant the babies and children in the images he had were real children being sexually abused. With one-third discounts for his guilty pleas Winterson was sentenced to 29 months in prison comprising 26 months for the distribution offences and eight months for the possession offences to run concurrently, and three months for the offending involving the 10-year-old girl to run consecutively with the 26 months. The defendant will be a registered sex offender for 10 years, and was made the subject of a sexual harm prevention order for the same length of time.
Sydney Morning Herald
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Forty years on, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit still tells a radical truth
When Jeanette Winterson was 23, she had an interview at the new feminist publisher, Pandora Press, hoping to be their publicist. She didn't get the job. But the way she talked about her extremely strange childhood impressed the publisher, Philippa Brewster, who told Winterson, 'If you can write it the way you tell it, I'll buy it.' Winterson had always written: sermons, stories to herself to try to make sense of the world. She hadn't tried to write a novel. 'I thought, I'll sit down and see what happens,' she says. 'I had no idea about gender, sexism, all of that.' But although she came from a family where non-religious books were banned, her mother had read to her daily from the King James Bible, which gave her a love of language, story and structure. What emerged was the fictionalised story of growing up in working-class Accrington, Lancashire, as the adopted child of an eccentric and fiercely Pentecostal evangelist mother. 'I thought I could write my way out,' she says. 'Language is something I can trust, so I can see the inside of my head. You need to be able to write yourself as a fiction, to understand you're a story in progress. I didn't need to be trapped in a narrative that belonged to somebody else.' The story was funny, awfully bizarre and bizarrely awful – what other child would have her deafness ignored because it was thought she was in a state of rapture? – but to the child Jeanette, it was just life, getting on with things while waiting for Jesus to come and roll up heaven like a scroll. Until at 16 she fell in love with a girl, and everything came apart. When you're a young person and you don't have anything, you believe it can only get better. After a few months of writing, she cycled back to Pandora with the only copy of her manuscript in her saddlebag (she couldn't afford to photocopy it). This time Pandora's other boss, Australian feminist Dale Spender, was in the office with Brewster. 'Dale snatched the manuscript and read the beginning. Like most people, I lived for a long time with my mother and father. My father liked to watch the wrestling, my mother liked to wrestle. She turned to Philippa and said, 'This is good.' I thought, Oh, there's a way in for me.' That manuscript became the hugely successful novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, published in 1985. The current publishers, Vintage Classics, are sending their star author around the world to celebrate the book's 40th anniversary. I read it in one breathless swoop, and like many fans, I can't believe it's been 40 years since. Nor can Winterson. She is talking to me from her home in the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire. Behind her are windows with a view of the woods and the sun is casting a halo over her curly head. An eager and fervent speaker, she still has her Northern accent. 'I was brought up in a gospel tent, I'm never nervous public speaking,' she says. 'They book me in for a lot of big events. The more people the better. I'm trying to present to people what I believe, that's part of my job.' She's keen to find the positives in even the worst things that have happened to her, and she's hopeful for the future where other writers are gloomy, particularly over her pet subject, the challenges we face with AI. In the early days, Oranges was sometimes slotted into the cookery bookshelves with the marmalade recipes. Later, it made its way onto the LGBTQ shelves. Now it's in with the literary classics and has found new generations of readers around the world. Winterson has since written 10 novels, as well as children's books, nonfiction and screenplays, including one for the prizewinning BBC TV adaptation of Oranges. She has won many awards, including a CBE and an OBE for services to literature, and her work is published in 28 countries. Young people respond to Orange' s queer coming of age story in China and Hungary. 'It's a classic, I'm not the kind of person they would want to ban. At this point in my life I have some useful status, I can get to places other people can't. I'm hoping because it's so well known and well-loved, it will be a kind of raft you can cling onto.' There wasn't much for young Jeanette to cling to when she fell in love. Mrs Winterson and her fellow church members held an exorcism, chanting continuous prayers, speaking in tongues and laying their hands on Jeanette. It had a hypnotic effect, she says. 'They do believe people are inhabited by devils and they can be expelled. But obviously to a young girl it was frightening.' Inevitably, teenage Jeanette had to leave home. She moved around for a couple of years, studying and working, living in a tent and sleeping on other people's floors. 'I thought, I can't pretend to be the person they want me to be. By then, things had broken down and were so full of distress and sadness that to stay would have been far worse.' One of her best times was living in a Mini, with its boot full of her favourite books. 'It wasn't as dramatic as it would be now. I felt free, I wasn't afraid. When you're a young person and you don't have anything, you believe it can only get better.' She eventually made her way to Oxford University to study English literature. 'It was wonderful, I was free to study. It was also a huge cultural shock because people like me were not there in any numbers. I didn't fit. But it changed my life completely; I was able to move into a different world.' Loading Winterson returned to her early years in 2012, this time in a memoir with the title from one of her mother's inspired sayings, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? She had come through a painful period after an attempted suicide and felt she needed to go back. With more distance between her and her childhood, she felt free to mention darker things. 'There's a lot more pain and hurt in that book. I could go back to some of the material and not have to disguise it.' One of Mrs Winterson's sayings was 'The devil had led me to the wrong crib'. Still, Winterson can see the bright side: 'It's absolutely appalling, but full of metaphor and colour. Suddenly we're not in a crummy two-up and two-down. We're in a fairy tale, an opera, a grand landscape where the devil will bother to come and deceive Mrs Winterson.' In the memoir, she details her quest to find her birth mother. She succeeded, but it turned out to be a mixed blessing. 'I was glad I found her. I wanted other adopted people to understand if they take that route, they shouldn't imagine there is going to be a pink focus, happy Hollywood ending. We're all going to do our best, but it's fine for it to go wrong.' Loading Winterson did have a reunion with her adoptive father before he died. 'I was angry with him for a long time for not standing up for me, and for beating me. I was glad I could meet him on his own terms, there was no point in going in for explanation. Dad was like a very little boy. I thought he was never really allowed to grow up.' Mrs Winterson died when her daughter was 30, so there was never time for a reunion. In any case, she thinks it would have been impossible. 'She was an absolutist. For her to recognise what happened to me would have reversed everything she believed. She was a deeply unhappy woman, and unhappiness closes you down.' When Winterson wrote Oranges, 'in my innocence I didn't realise that women were only ever supposed to write about their own experience in a small way. But I don't care. If people are still reading it, if it can still be in print 40 years later, all over the world, I have got something right.'
The Age
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Forty years on, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit still tells a radical truth
When Jeanette Winterson was 23, she had an interview at the new feminist publisher, Pandora Press, hoping to be their publicist. She didn't get the job. But the way she talked about her extremely strange childhood impressed the publisher, Philippa Brewster, who told Winterson, 'If you can write it the way you tell it, I'll buy it.' Winterson had always written: sermons, stories to herself to try to make sense of the world. She hadn't tried to write a novel. 'I thought, I'll sit down and see what happens,' she says. 'I had no idea about gender, sexism, all of that.' But although she came from a family where non-religious books were banned, her mother had read to her daily from the King James Bible, which gave her a love of language, story and structure. What emerged was the fictionalised story of growing up in working-class Accrington, Lancashire, as the adopted child of an eccentric and fiercely Pentecostal evangelist mother. 'I thought I could write my way out,' she says. 'Language is something I can trust, so I can see the inside of my head. You need to be able to write yourself as a fiction, to understand you're a story in progress. I didn't need to be trapped in a narrative that belonged to somebody else.' The story was funny, awfully bizarre and bizarrely awful – what other child would have her deafness ignored because it was thought she was in a state of rapture? – but to the child Jeanette, it was just life, getting on with things while waiting for Jesus to come and roll up heaven like a scroll. Until at 16 she fell in love with a girl, and everything came apart. When you're a young person and you don't have anything, you believe it can only get better. After a few months of writing, she cycled back to Pandora with the only copy of her manuscript in her saddlebag (she couldn't afford to photocopy it). This time Pandora's other boss, Australian feminist Dale Spender, was in the office with Brewster. 'Dale snatched the manuscript and read the beginning. Like most people, I lived for a long time with my mother and father. My father liked to watch the wrestling, my mother liked to wrestle. She turned to Philippa and said, 'This is good.' I thought, Oh, there's a way in for me.' That manuscript became the hugely successful novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, published in 1985. The current publishers, Vintage Classics, are sending their star author around the world to celebrate the book's 40th anniversary. I read it in one breathless swoop, and like many fans, I can't believe it's been 40 years since. Nor can Winterson. She is talking to me from her home in the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire. Behind her are windows with a view of the woods and the sun is casting a halo over her curly head. An eager and fervent speaker, she still has her Northern accent. 'I was brought up in a gospel tent, I'm never nervous public speaking,' she says. 'They book me in for a lot of big events. The more people the better. I'm trying to present to people what I believe, that's part of my job.' She's keen to find the positives in even the worst things that have happened to her, and she's hopeful for the future where other writers are gloomy, particularly over her pet subject, the challenges we face with AI. In the early days, Oranges was sometimes slotted into the cookery bookshelves with the marmalade recipes. Later, it made its way onto the LGBTQ shelves. Now it's in with the literary classics and has found new generations of readers around the world. Winterson has since written 10 novels, as well as children's books, nonfiction and screenplays, including one for the prizewinning BBC TV adaptation of Oranges. She has won many awards, including a CBE and an OBE for services to literature, and her work is published in 28 countries. Young people respond to Orange' s queer coming of age story in China and Hungary. 'It's a classic, I'm not the kind of person they would want to ban. At this point in my life I have some useful status, I can get to places other people can't. I'm hoping because it's so well known and well-loved, it will be a kind of raft you can cling onto.' There wasn't much for young Jeanette to cling to when she fell in love. Mrs Winterson and her fellow church members held an exorcism, chanting continuous prayers, speaking in tongues and laying their hands on Jeanette. It had a hypnotic effect, she says. 'They do believe people are inhabited by devils and they can be expelled. But obviously to a young girl it was frightening.' Inevitably, teenage Jeanette had to leave home. She moved around for a couple of years, studying and working, living in a tent and sleeping on other people's floors. 'I thought, I can't pretend to be the person they want me to be. By then, things had broken down and were so full of distress and sadness that to stay would have been far worse.' One of her best times was living in a Mini, with its boot full of her favourite books. 'It wasn't as dramatic as it would be now. I felt free, I wasn't afraid. When you're a young person and you don't have anything, you believe it can only get better.' She eventually made her way to Oxford University to study English literature. 'It was wonderful, I was free to study. It was also a huge cultural shock because people like me were not there in any numbers. I didn't fit. But it changed my life completely; I was able to move into a different world.' Loading Winterson returned to her early years in 2012, this time in a memoir with the title from one of her mother's inspired sayings, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? She had come through a painful period after an attempted suicide and felt she needed to go back. With more distance between her and her childhood, she felt free to mention darker things. 'There's a lot more pain and hurt in that book. I could go back to some of the material and not have to disguise it.' One of Mrs Winterson's sayings was 'The devil had led me to the wrong crib'. Still, Winterson can see the bright side: 'It's absolutely appalling, but full of metaphor and colour. Suddenly we're not in a crummy two-up and two-down. We're in a fairy tale, an opera, a grand landscape where the devil will bother to come and deceive Mrs Winterson.' In the memoir, she details her quest to find her birth mother. She succeeded, but it turned out to be a mixed blessing. 'I was glad I found her. I wanted other adopted people to understand if they take that route, they shouldn't imagine there is going to be a pink focus, happy Hollywood ending. We're all going to do our best, but it's fine for it to go wrong.' Loading Winterson did have a reunion with her adoptive father before he died. 'I was angry with him for a long time for not standing up for me, and for beating me. I was glad I could meet him on his own terms, there was no point in going in for explanation. Dad was like a very little boy. I thought he was never really allowed to grow up.' Mrs Winterson died when her daughter was 30, so there was never time for a reunion. In any case, she thinks it would have been impossible. 'She was an absolutist. For her to recognise what happened to me would have reversed everything she believed. She was a deeply unhappy woman, and unhappiness closes you down.' When Winterson wrote Oranges, 'in my innocence I didn't realise that women were only ever supposed to write about their own experience in a small way. But I don't care. If people are still reading it, if it can still be in print 40 years later, all over the world, I have got something right.'
BBC News
05-05-2025
- Health
- BBC News
The Wells walking group helping men stop 'bottling everything up'
A weekly walking group has given men in one city the chance to escape the "pressure" of keeping their feelings "bottled up". More than 20 men now meet every Tuesday in Wells as part of the national Men Walking & Talking movement, which has seen groups spring up across the country. The group is open to all men living in the area, giving them a space to open up about their lives as they explore the nearby countryside. Neil Winterson, one of the original members of the Wells group, said it was "absolutely amazing" to have more than 20 people taking part. Mr Winterson said the group spoke about "anything and everything" during the walks, adding: "It can be the weather, it can be the wife, it can be work, or it can be something a little deeper."Having suffered with anxiety, Mr Winterson said he had received "really good support" from other walkers. "It just makes you feel really normal, like you're not out there on your own," he added. 'Early therapy' Having started with just one walk in Telford in 2021, Men Walking & Talking has expanded to towns and cities across England and Wales. There is no need to formally sign up to the group, nor is there any cost involved - the aim of all the groups is simply to give men space to open up and talk without judgement. Steve Chitty, who joined the group in February 2024 after suffering a period of anxiety and depression following a difficult event, said joining the walks was "effectively for me, early therapy". He told the BBC that taking part had allowed him to admit he had been through something "in an environment where I know there will be no judgement". "[This] isn't necessarily always easy to do in an immediate social group when you've got people who have known you for years where you've built up a certain reputation, or with your professional work colleagues who have a certain view of you," he said. "Nobody brings any of that baggage to this group and it is open arms - you can bring whatever you need to bring and we'll give you as much support as we can." While the group gave space to walkers to open up about specific events or experiences, Mr Winterson explained it was also an opportunity to escape the pressures of day-to-day life. "Men tend to bottle everything up - 'pull your socks up', 'stiff upper lip', 'man up,' - which is a phrase I think we've all used over the years but the world's a changing place."Just being there for each other, being there to listen, being there to support is really important and that's why we come out every week."
The Guardian
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Jeanette Winterson: ‘I'd like to go up in space as a very old lady and just be pushed out'
Your debut novel Oranges are Not the Only Fruit turns 40 years old this year. How do you feel about it at this point in your life? Can you believe it? I find that astonishing. I'm always having to think about it because people keep bothering me about it! Its next iteration is a musical, and then I really hope that's the end. Just let me go! Obviously I love Oranges and I revisited it again with [her 2011 memoir] Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal? and the musical too. Surely, by the rule of three, this is it? Then I can live in peace and plant potatoes. That's your vision of peace, potatoes? Oh yes. I love growing vegetables and fruits. That's my happy place. I have a huge garden. I'm very simple: I like to be at home, tend to my garden, walk the dogs, and that's about it. I'm really hoping that this time will come. I was thinking, until the whole world tipped on its side and Trump came to power and everything's gone horribly wrong, that I'd be winding down to a quieter life. But I know that's not going to be the case. I'm going to have to just fight alongside my comrades and stick around till I drop dead. Actually, the potatoes are ready to go in the ground now – I am going to do all that this weekend. When you are thinking of Oranges, I'll just be thinking about potatoes. Do you ever think about that time everyone got cross at you because you shot a rabbit in your garden? Yeah! And I've shot many since. I'm sure in Australia they'd be thinking, 'Why would anybody care if she shot a rabbit?' You can't live in the country and worry about things like that. When I got it, I skinned it and it was beautiful. It looked like a Vermeer. I put it on a tin plate, and I cooked it with some cider and rosemary. I chopped the skin up and put it outside for the birds, because they love that to line their nests. I gave all the innards to the cat. But this just freaked everybody out! People said, 'I'll never read Winterson's books again.' I thought, do you only read books by vegans? It's that kind of social media insanity where things spin out of control completely. Everybody got mad because I set my books on fire as well. But I didn't like the covers and I was in a really bad mood, and I thought, fuck it. They're my books. I shouldn't burn anybody else's books; that would be wrong, even ones I don't like. Even Jordan Peterson's, I wouldn't burn them. But my own books – why can't I? They belong to me. So I did and, of course, I put it on Twitter. Then the whole Penguin Random House was reading this while having their Sunday lunch and went into meltdown. You can't do anything in this life any more. Shoot it. Burn it. Is your house still haunted by ghosts? Oh yes, but not this house. This is a ghost-free zone. The ghosts are in my house in London. I may be speaking too soon because he may have just gone on vacation, but I think he might have gone. It's very difficult to know whether an entity has truly vanished – what does a ghost do when they're not bothering you? But mine has stopped switching the radio on at night and sitting on the bed. I had some friends staying there and he didn't set the smoke alarms off, which is his favourite – he's never liked visitors. Somebody said I should do an exorcism but I can't do that! I'm a Guardian-reading liberal – where is he going to live? It's really hard to get somewhere to live when you're alive, how's he going to cope? And everywhere is all Ikea and carpeted now; this poor, dead dude needs an 18th-century house. You recently wrote for us about your admiration for a short story written by Open AI's creative writing model. Do you feel alone in your optimism about AI among authors? Yeah, I do. That was a fabulous piece of writing. AI has always been important to me and I've been writing about it for decades. I don't think the doom and gloom around AI is helping us, because all we're doing is moving the public conversation towards a dystopia while the tech bros are just going on doing exactly what they want, and the bigger conversation with more people in it isn't happening. One of the things that even secular people hate is the idea that this is the end, there's no further to go. It feels ridiculous! We're made of meat, we've got these fabulous minds, and we die – whose stupid idea was that? So I think there's this sympathy towards the idea of being able to move outside of a bounded condition, which AI will allow in all sorts of ways. And none of the benefits are really being discussed because, as usual, we think they will accrue to the very, very few and could cause enormous misery, just like with the first industrial revolution. It's like we've learned nothing from history and we really, really do need to learn this lesson. So I'm not pessimistic about what we're doing. I think it's our best chance of getting ourselves out of many of the messes we're in. But I am pessimistic about the way the conversation's going. Who is the most famous person in your phone? Nigella! She'll be in Australia when I'm there. We often cross over and she always takes me to lunch – somewhere fantastic where I wouldn't be able to get in under my own steam. We always get wonderful food. What's the oldest thing you own? My house in Spitalfields. It was built before the French Revolution, in the early 1780s. It was very common around that time to sacrifice cats – they were unfortunately buried alive with little charms around their feet. We were digging down into the foundations so that you could actually stand up in the basement and we found a cat buried there. I said, 'When we get to level, let's put the cat back and put a nice cover over him.' And that's what I did, in a respectful way. I don't think taking something like that out of a house is a good idea. That's my superstitious self. What's the best piece of advice you've ever received? This was said by my dear friend, the crime writer Ruth Rendell, who gave me space to write early in my career, and was very kind to me. When I was about to turn 40, she said: 'Jeanette, from now on, you go to the gym three times a week.' And that's what I've done for the last 25 years. I just took her at her word, and I never stopped. It's been fantastic because it's kept me healthy and fit. It gives me tonnes of energy. I'm the same weight, I can run 5km without difficulty and I'm strong. So thank you Ruth Rendell, because she could have said some profound shit about spirit and soul. But so what, really? Would you rather die at the bottom of the ocean or out in space? Well, I'm assuming that none of us will die peacefully in our beds. I do doubt it now. But if we have the opportunity to die at an old age, I'd like to go up in space as a very old lady and just be pushed out. That's how I'd like to die. I'd like to see the Earth from above. I think that will be the most moving, beautiful thing. And then I'd like to go in some sort of chute. Just let me go. I'll be dead instantly. And then everything will come apart and there'll be bits of me all over the universe, and I'll be back as a piece of stardust, the way we all started. What is the weirdest thing you have done for love? This house is like the Taj Mahal, because I've always built things on to my property for my serious girlfriends. But then either I've left them or they've left me! So the kitchen that we're in now was built for my ex-wife Susie Orbach, because she's a New York Jew and she loves to cook. When we got together, I ended up building this fucking huge kitchen. And then we got divorced. But it doesn't matter, because I've got this fantastic American fridge with the water in the door. And when I was with the theatre director Deborah Warner, I built a huge studio in the garden so she could rehearse her plays with actors. She left me, but now I've got this fantastic studio so that's good. My present girlfriend is very modest: all she wanted was a hen house, because she likes chickens. I'm probably the most practical person you'll ever meet – that's why I show my love in these ways. If I can build something for you, I will. If you could change the size of any animal to keep as a pet, what would it be? Make a cat bigger, like the size of a dog. Wouldn't that be cool? I don't want to make a big cat smaller – I want a small cat, big. I've also always thought, how wonderful it would be to have a giant bird to ride. How good it would be if we could escape over the trees? I'd like a woodpecker, the ones with the red skirt. That would do it for me. Jeanette Winterson is appearing at Sydney writers' festival as part of the opening night gala In This Together (20 May), The Art and Science of AI (21 May) and 40 Years of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (22 May); then in Melbourne at The Capitol Theatre for Forty Years of Storytelling (24 May).
