David Smith, a former Tory councillor for Middlesbrough, was found guilty of multiple counts of the child sex abuse of two teenage boys.
Smith, 33, who was elected as a councillor in May 2019, was charged only 2 months later, and found guilty on Wednesday of the 11 counts charged, which included inciting and engaging in sexual activity with a child.
Teeside Crown Court heard that Smith had groomed and repeatedly sexually assaulted the first teenage boy over the course of 4 years, starting in 2012. The victim alleged that Smith spent £6-£10,000 on gifts on him over the years to keep quiet, including clothes and drugs.
“I used to smoke cannabis a lot and he used buy me it. He used to buy me it every day, at least £20 a day,” the boy told the court. “After I smoked it I would just go to sleep and when I woke up, he would be touching me,” he added, with his ex-girlfriend saying the abuse had “destroyed their relationship” as he was “traumatised.”
The second victim alleged that Smith “repeatedly” exposed himself to him. “He would flash me and as a kid I was shocked and didn’t know where to put myself,” he said. “After a month and a half, it went from flashing at me to him asking me to touch him. It got to the point where he was getting closer to me and got more insistent.”
Smith denied the allegations, telling police that he had a “good relationship” with the first victim, and that he was the first person he had come out as gay to. He claimed that he couldn’t have spent all the money on his victim, as at the time he had “less than £1” in his bank accounts.
The Tory councillor first gained national media attention in June 2019, only a month before his arrest for child sex abuse, with his demand that Middlesbrough become a “gender neutral” town, and asked the mayor to make a start on the issue by making all toilets owned by the council gender neutral.
“Through my time interacting with local transgender and non-binary people, I’ve seen first hand the difficulties faced by these individuals when accessing public toilets and changing rooms,” Smith said at the time. “The feeling of humiliation is an experience that most of us don’t go through when visiting a public toilet and, in 2019, that is simply unacceptable.”
He ironically dismissed serious concerns that sexual assault and other such crimes would increase with gender neutral facilities being common. “In fact, if anyone has any intention in committing a crime at present, they will do so,” he argued. “This is about creating a much more safer environment for transgender and non binary people.”
The verdict on Smith, who will be sentenced in May, comes only two days after Imran Ahmad Khan, a Conservative MP, was also found guilty of sexually assaulting a teenage boy.
The complainant, now 29, told the court that Ahmad Khan said he was a “good-looking boy,” and had been “slow caressing” him after he plied the teenager with alcohol. He said that the MP for Wakefield did not stop after he was told to do so, and proceeded to molest him further.
