At London’s Southwark Crown Court, in May 2016, Dr John Davies, a dangerous criminal was finally sent to prison, having evaded justice for decades. Davies was imprisoned alongside his son Benjamin Davies .The judge that sentenced Davies to 12 years in prison described his crimes as ‘despicable’.

But Davies was not imprisoned for his numerous crimes against women and children, but for masterminding a sophisticated charity operation that netted him more than £5 million defrauded from the British taxpayer.

As a lifelong feminist, campaigning against sexual violence, I had been investigating Davies for almost 20 years for his crimes of sexual violence and abuse dating back to the early 1980s. But despite investigations by Europol, and by police in the UK, Croatia, Hungary, Romania and the US into allegations of baby trafficking and organised prostitution, somehow nothing ever stuck to Davies.

My investigation of him is a saga-length exposé that has had a considerable effect on my life. It has almost landed me in court on libel charges, prompted me to travel to several countries in pursuit of evidence, and introduced me to the best and the worst of humanity. Davies is the most dangerous man I have encountered in almost four decades of campaigning against crimes towards women and girls, and yet prior to his conviction in 2016 he was considered an esteemed academic, a philanthropist running charities for impoverished women and girls, an anti trafficking activist, and a goodhearted Christian.

John Davies

I first met Davies in 1999 at a conference about sex trafficking of women and girls. I was approached by two police officers who were aware that I was a British anti-trafficking campaigner. They asked if I knew “the big man in the corner … Teflon John … wearing a grubby-looking suit?” The officers told me that Davies, who traveled the world speaking about trafficking at academic conferences, was suspected of running a ‘baby fattening’ business from his farm in Hungary, in Balástya, close to the Romanian border. There was evidence gathered by the Metropolitan Police in London that Davies had combed the Balkan region looking for pregnant women who had been raped by soldiers. Posing as a Christian missionary, Davies offered the women a place to see out their pregnancy and then he offered to find a respectable, loving couple from the US or UK to adopt their baby.

I made enquiries among my anti-trafficking colleagues, some of who had heard rumours about Davies’ baby trafficking exploits. One activist told me that Davies had been overheard at a conference bragging to a delegate that he helped “girls” get to London and Athens, and that he could “fiddle” with visas. Davies was a passionate supporter of legalised prostitution and referred to trafficked women as “migrant sex workers”. She told me: “Rumours about him selling newborn babies to Western couples were well-substantiated.” Davies threatened to sue her when she published information about him on her website.

I discovered an article from the Sunday Times from January 1999 repeating allegations about baby trafficking that had been made in previous newspaper reports about Davies way back in 1995. The Sunday Times piece reported on a more recent scandal: Davies had been investigated by the European Commission on suspicion of running a roadside brothel near his Hungarian farmhouse. The grant had been awarded to Davies to provide ‘roadside services’, such as distributing condoms and providing legal advice and counseling, for ‘sex workers’; the preferred term used to describe women in prostitution by those who consider it to be harmless moneymaking endeavour. I heard from my contacts that when allegations of Davies’ criminal exploits had been exposed on the website of an anti-trafficking academic in the US, Davies again threatened to sue and the academic was forced by the university administration to remove her allegations.

I decided to keep an eye on Davies and did so for a number of years, keeping in touch with the police officers from the anti-trafficking conference in 1999. They told me they were investigating him for major charity fraud but that he was usually at least one step ahead of law enforcement. I had hoped that they might go back to the early days of his baby trafficking exploits and find a way to charge him with those crimes but it appeared that his tracks had been very well covered.

THE BACKGROUND

In the late 1980s, Davies moved with his then wife Cathy Williamson and their children from London to Romania claiming to be bringing bibles and food to the dispossessed. This was a time of war and the collapse of Communism, so Davies came up with a clever business plan: he linked up with one of the many commercial adoption agencies (posing as Christian pro-life charities) and offered to be the ‘British consultant’. I spoke to Pastor Wayne Coombs who ran the Adam Children Fund, and he told me that Davies brought in "about 40" babies from Romania to Hungary and said that he could find British adoptees. Two of the US-based adoptive parents I tracked down, who admit to buying babies from Davies, said they were charged US$20,000 “expenses” before the babies were handed over. “He said there were so many of these women and that they were all pregnant every nine months by a different guy,” said Coombs. “And that they had no way of taking care of them.”

The family farm in Balástya

Davies moved his family and his operations to Balástya, probably because the laws on inter-country adoption were far more liberal than in bordering Romania. Davies continued to scour Eastern Europe on behalf of the Adam Children’s Fund. In 1994, Davies was detained and accused of trafficking 28 pregnant women into Hungary to give birth, having already sold their unborn babies to Americans. Senator Hillary Clinton intervened and the children were then flown to the US. Davies was subsequently banned from entering the US or Romania. In 1995, Davies was also thrown out of Croatia after being arrested and held in prison for three weeks on suspicion of coercing pregnant Bosnian refugees to give up their babies.

Davies instead decided he would focus on ‘helping’ Roma women and girls in Balástya, a notorious street prostitution spot. He established two scam charities – the Morova Foundation and the Salamon and Ilidiko K Memorial Foundation – in order to obtain hundreds of thousands of dollars from the EU and USAID and NGOs. In 1997, a European Commission (EC) report found that €140,000 of EU funds had been misappropriated and spent on personal effects by Davies. The investigation also found he was operating a roadside brothel and that women had “gone missing”. I tracked down Albrecht Rothacher, the EC inspector in charge of Davies’ project, who agreed to an interview on the record. He told me: “Davies was very skilled and had convinced the commission that he wanted to run a support service for gypsy women, when in fact he was pimping them out to Turkish truck drivers. It kept me awake at night. It was the worst case of fraud we had ever had.”

I discovered that in 1998 Hungary had attempted to deport Davies but was thwarted when his fellow sex trade lobbyists, many of whom were academics, wrote glowing testimonials to the British Consulate and consequently he was allowed to remain. Brandishing fake degrees, Davies enrolled in a PhD at Sussex University’s Centre For Migration Research (SCMR) to conduct ‘ethnographic’ research into the sex trafficking of women and girls from Albania into Greece and France.

SCMR has mentored a number of scholars who produce propaganda claiming trafficking of women and girls into the sex trade is “a myth” and prostitution is “a choice and a job”: they also use scare quotes around ‘trafficking’ and ‘prostitution’, or avoid the words altogether because they prettify it as “sex work”. It was a perfect cover for Davies. When the academic institutions he was involved with faced criticism from feminists for refusing to investigate claims about his criminal behaviour, Davies would simply suggest that he was disliked because of his views on the sex trade. His doctoral studies, and his very vocal support of the legalisation of prostitution as a way to curb human trafficking, led him to be invited to speak at numerous conferences all over the world.

In 1999, Davies moved to Thessaloniki, Greece, an area notorious for its sex trade, claiming he was “mapping migratory routes” from Albania and Romania into the sex-trade of Greece and Turkey as part of research for his doctoral thesis. However, after Davies was sent to prison for charity fraud in 2016, I wrote an article about his crimes and was contacted by Pye Jakobsson, a well-known “sex worker rights activist”. Pye told me that in 1999 she was approached by a colleague of Davies’ who explained that he was conducting his doctoral research, which would involve interviewing women in ‘sex work’ in strip clubs in Thessaloniki. “It became clear as soon as I arrived something was wrong. Davies said he needed …a female assistant who the interviewees would feel comfortable with. But when I arrived and met the girls they said they were going to be working in nightclubs. So I realised he had tricked them. After I confronted him, because the girls were getting upset, he asked me, “Can’t you get them to sell sex?”

“I was terrified of him," said Pye. The women were wanting to go home but Davies had taken all of their passports from them.” In 2001, Davies moved his research to Lyon, France, to escape the attention of the police.

Brothel in Thessaloniki

The US-based feminist academic Janice Raymond was also monitoring John Davies. Raymond called me in 2002 and told me that Davies had been employed as an anti-trafficking expert by the Bangladeshi Government to advise on the growing phenomenon of child trafficking. However, Davies was dismissed from his role when an anti-trafficking advocate close to government ministers presented evidence from news cuttings about Davies’ criminal exploits. "He was actually sent home for “womanising, drugs and gambling” the advocate told me.

THE TRIAL

In July 2008, after stepping off a flight from Bangladesh, which Davies continued to visit after his expulsion, he was arrested by police and charged with six counts of sexually assaulting two sisters in 1980 and 1981. The complainants were ‘Carla’, who was six when the alleged crimes took place, and ‘Josie’, who had been eight. Davies was also charged with raping Carla: an offence that carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

The trial in July 2009 lasted one week. I was aware that Davies had been charged with historic child abuse because I happened to receive a review copy of his newly published book My Name Is Not Natasha, a classic trafficking denial handbook, in which Davies argued that trafficking Albanian women into a life of prostitution in France was preferable to living in relative poverty. The book was based on his PhD, which was awarded by the University of Sussex in 2007.

I was so angry at his trafficking denial stance that I was prompted to call my contact at the Metropolitan Police who had been keeping track of Davies, and asked if they had built any type of case against him as yet. “You are not going to believe this, Julie,” he said, “I have just seen on the [computer] that he is up on child abuse charges next month!”

I attended the trial at Kingston Crown Court and Davies did a double take when he spotted me on the press bench. Although we had attended some of the same conferences since we first met in 1999, we had kept a distance. Davies was well aware that I was investigating him. I had sent several emails to members of a listserve that Davies had previously used to drum up support whenever new accusations regarding his baby trafficking and other illegal activities re-emerged in the public arena. The listserve was full of academics and campaigners that, like Davies, thought prostitution to be an honourable ‘profession’ and that legalising pimps and punters was the only way to secure the ‘rights’ of the women selling sex.  

At trial, Davies relied on outwardly contradictory defences. He said the sisters were not abused, however if they had been then the perpetrator was not Davies himself but his younger brother Mark who, in 2009, was actually in a care home having suffered brain damage following a heroin overdose. There was another possible explanation not relied upon in Court. When first questioned by the police, Davies invented the tale of a fictional Mormon who lived with him around 1980 and 1981 and looked exactly like him. Davies claimed he kicked the Mormon out of his house after discovering he was a pedophile.

Two medical experts gave evidence for Davies at the trial: Dr Princess Nothemba (Nono) Simelela and Professor AB Sebastian van As. Simelela - who is South Africa’s first black obstetrician gynaecologist - is considered a national hero for her work in slowing the devastation of HIV/AIDS in her homeland. Van As was, and still is, a distinguished South African pediatric surgeon specialising in physical trauma as a result of sexual abuse. I was surprised that the defence team had not been able to find experts from the UK to give evidence and wondered about Davies’ connection to South Africa.

Simelela’s evidence amounted to this: 36 per cent of sexual abuse victims showed no physical trauma and only half of those who did suffered lacerations. She said that if Carla had been raped then she would have been traumatised and lacerated. Despite not being a child psychologist, Simelela also put forward the view that had Carla been raped, her distress would have been obvious to an adult. Van As added that Carla would likely have suffered vaginal tearing. Both were briefly quizzed as to whether they knew Davies and both answered that they had met Davies “at anti-trafficking conferences”.

The Rev Dr Raymond Warren and Dr Jane Verbitsky were Davies’ character witnesses. Warren from Massachusetts, USA, wearing a clerical collar, told the Court he’d known Davies for 25 years, that the two were “very close” and they “shared a similar view of the gospel”. Verbitsky, a Senior Lecturer in Human Rights from New Zealand’s Auckland University of Technology, told the Court that having met Davies at conferences in 2006 and 2007 she noticed his fingernails were bitten “right down to the quick” and he was “fastidious” about his hygiene. When the two complainants made their statements to police, both independently said that the man who raped and abused them was “filthy, disgusting and had dirty fingernails bitten down to the quick”. They also both said that he lived in a semi-derelict house. Again, I wondered why Davies could not have found character witnesses from the UK, such as his university colleagues. After all, he was still a Visiting Researcher at University of Sussex’ Centre for Migration Research (SCMR).

University of Sussex

Davies’ former wife Cathy Williamson and their son Benjamin and daughter Samantha gave evidence that he was “fastidiously clean” and a good father. A number of people who knew Davies have since told me that he was a slovenly man with poor hygiene, long fingernails and who lived in a pigsty. “It was as though everyone was coached to say that,” says Chris Caulfield, a local journalist who covered the trial.

During the trial, Davies - with his book hot off the press - revelled in his academic status: insisting he be called ‘Dr Davies’. At the time of the trial, he was also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a member of the European Commission’s Expert Network on Migration, Integration and Social Cohesion. Indeed, Davies was such a faithful scholar that when he was on bail awaiting trial for child abuse, he regularly traveled outside the UK to attend conferences on migration and sex trafficking.

At the end of the trial, Davies was acquitted of all charges. For years after the 2009 trial, I remained profoundly disturbed by the expert medical evidence of Simelela that “the rapes could not have occurred because the children would have sustained injuries which they would have reported”. 

Immediately following his acquittal, Davies moved to South Africa but returned to the UK in 2013, having been “kicked out” for “criminal activities”. It was then that he returned to trafficking and pimping more women and girls from Bangladesh and India.

THE INVESTIGATION

Following the 2009 trial, I took a closer look at the SCMR to try to understand why so many of its research graduates appear to focus on what they term “migration for sex work”. I emailed the then head of SCMR, Professor Richard Black (who was also Davies’ PhD supervisor) for a response. I listed his colleagues’ campaigning for a legal sex trade and wrote that Davies had been “investigated and arrested on suspicion of trafficking in Croatia, been banned from five countries over the years on suspicion of baby trafficking and has been investigated by Europol and Interpol”.

One week after sending my email – for which I received no response - a solicitor’s letter arrived at my home address on behalf of Davies. It was a ‘letter before action’ threatening to sue me for “defamation of character” and denying all of the allegations I put to Black. I was offered a get-out clause: pay £5,000 to a charity of Davies’s choice and make a public apology.

I decided to use the threat towards me as motivation to dig even deeper into the life and crimes of Davies - something I had started in 1999. I found so much evidence to back up the allegations I’d made in the email to Professor Black that, after I’d submitted my defence to Davies’s lawyer, I heard nothing further. But my investigations led me to discover that Davies was involved in pimping and trafficking women and children in several countries around the world, and was actually far more dangerous than I had ever imagined. I waited for an opportunity to expose him without any further threat of legal action.

My investigation led me to West London brothels in Surbiton and Kingston as well as the red-light districts of Dubai, where Davies pimped women and girls, advertising them as ‘Devadasi’, the so-called “sacred prostitutes of India” who supposedly sell sex to men as part of a ‘religious experience’ for which they are trained from birth. In reality – according to punter websites – these “sacred prostitutes” actually “spoke no English and were miserably unenthusiastic”. I located scores of websites and blogs prostituting women with names such as ‘Kama of Kingston’, ‘Molli Desi’ and ‘Rani Desi’. I have also uncovered business records and websites used by the women and girls who Davies trafficked and pimped, and traced the ISP addresses back to one of his aliases: ‘John Shelton’. Davies also used the names John Glyn Davies, and Glyndwr Selwyn Owain Davies.

THE WITNESSES

I also investigated the various individuals who spoke up for Davies during his child abuse trial. I recalled that the European Commission investigation into the misappropriated funds had named Davies’ ex-wife Cathy as being involved in her husband’s operations. I traveled to their Balástya home but both Cathy and her daughter Samantha declined to speak to me.

Cathy’s son Benjamin Davies was a graduate from the same SCMR that conferred his father a PhD, and had jointly authored papers with his father endorsing the sex-trade lobby’s rhetoric that being trafficked into prostitution is better than going hungry. Benjamin was also – we now know – a conman when he gave evidence at his father’s child abuse trial in 2009. Moreover, at this time Benjamin was managing and performing in a BDSM ‘show’, and I discovered photographs of Benjamin that depict him dressed in military fatigues, beating a naked woman covered in what I assume is fake blood. Benjamin was convicted, alongside his father, of money-laundering at the 2016 trial and sentenced to five years in prison.

Verbitsky, who had been a character witness for Davies in his 2009 trial, became a co-trustee of Davies’ fraudulent Sompan Foundation only days after Davies walked free from court. I have made several attempts to communicate with Verbitsky but she has always declined to respond. I also contacted the so-called Rev Dr Warren at his Massachusetts-based basement design company and he too has declined to answer questions about his relationship with Davies’ operations I uncovered.

Following the 2009 trial, Simelela returned to South Africa to take up a position as Advisor to the Deputy President of South Africa on HIV/AIDS; while Davies relocated his visiting fellowship from SCMR to the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. I suspected that Davies and Simelela were in an intimate relationship and eventually found the evidence on the social media account of an associate of Davies’. It was a series of photographs from a bowling alley, not far from Davies’ Esher home in the UK, and one photograph was of Davies and Simelela intimately embracing. The photograph, date-stamped 15 January 2009, was posted on Facebook four months before the trial.

I traveled to South Africa to find people who might know the couple. I made half a dozen attempts to contact Davies’ witness van As while in Cape Town, where he runs the Paediatric Trauma Unit at the Red Cross Children’s Hospital, but was eventually forced to give up.

Some months later, back in the UK, I tried again to contact van As and this time he replied, inviting me to call him. Van As told me that while he stands by the “factual accuracy” of his evidence, he does regret providing it because he knew Davies and Simelela “were in some type of relation”. Van As told me that he was flattered that Davies and Simelela asked him to be an expert witness at the trial but in retrospect he conceded what Simelela did was “probably illegal”. Van As admitted to me that he had several pre-trial meetings with Davies in the Netherlands and South Africa where, on one occasion, Davies lied about there being a “new law” in the UK which was being exploited by “false reporters of rape” who would be paid “a fortune in compensation”.

In September 2016, awaiting trial for fraud, Davies was taken from his prison cell and driven back to Kingston Crown Court where, in 2009, he had been acquitted on child rape and sexual abuse, and convicted for offences that earned him a further three years in prison. During police raids on his Esher home in 2012 and 2014 while he was being investigated for international charity fraud, multiple weapons were uncovered, including stun guns disguised as mobile telephones and canisters of CS gas.

Now, in 2018, as Davies languishes in prison, his harmful legacy continues. Davies advised government ministers in the UK and Bangladesh, and led major research projects for NGOs. His research has been relied on in migration tribunal hearings and has informed countless organisations including the United Nations and HIV/AIDS prevention bodies. He is still considered the international expert on the trafficking of Albanian women into Western Europe.

But Davies’ real legacy is the women and girls he has abused. I have spoken to two of the now adults who, as babies, were taken from their birth mothers in Hungary and sold by Davies to US couples. I also spoke to their adoptive parents who admitted that they knew Davies was a crook and, in the words of one, there was “something badly wrong about the whole operation”.

The Bangladeshi women pimped in and around West London have disappeared from the escort agency websites, with the occasional punter posting a message asking where they are. For Carla and Josie, they still hope that Davies will pay the price for what he did to them. “I wanted justice to be done. In the end I saw that they knew I haven’t been lying and yet he still got away with it,” Josie told me. “What will it take to get people to realise how dangerous John Davies is?”

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