Earlier this week, ex-Lost Prophets frontman Ian Watkins went on trial for having a cell phone in prison, telling the court that the phone found in his ass didn’t belong to him. Now, he is refusing to tell the court who the phone actually belonged to.
Watkins, who is currently serving a 35-year prison sentence at HM Prison Wakefield in Wakefield, England after being convicted of 13 counts of child sex offenses in 2013, claimed that he feared for his life if he told on his fellow inmates. According to a report from the BBC, he told a jury that the phone was thrown down on his bed and when he said he could not keep it, was told “if you don’t you’ll get taken out,” clarifying that they would have slit his throat if he didn’t do what they said. He continued, “Once you snitch in jail it just brings a world of trouble down on you.”
When asked, Watkins said that the men who had given him the phone were interested in the large amount of fan mail he got and wanted him to “hook them up” with some of the women as a “revenue stream.” Pressed further about the letters, Watkins said that some included sexual fantasies about him, but that the reason he kept them was because he has “always been a hoarder.”
The phone was originally found in March 2018 following a strip search. While nothing was found initially, Watkins ended up producing a white 8cm GT Star cell phone from his underwear, presumably kept in his anus, during a 15-minute watch fearing that he would not be able to see his parents who were visiting him. The charger was later found in his prison cell.
Despite Watkins pleading not guilty to “one count of possessing an unauthorized item in prison” back in March 2019 and claiming that he hid the phone “under duress,” prosecutor Stephen Wood believed he had used the phone to contact a former girlfriend, who alerted the prison staff to the calls. The woman, Gabriella Persson, was called to testify in Monday’s trial, telling the jury that Watkins had contacted her on an unknown number in March 2018. When cross-examined by Watkins’ defense lawyer Gareth Burrows, Perrson also told the jury that there were only two calls, neither o which was used to ask for money or threaten anyone, and that she had deleted any text messages because she did not want to get in trouble.
The trial continues….
