News Segment

JUDAS PRIEST DRUMMER JAILED FOR ATTEMPTED RAPE:

February 13, 2004

LONDON – The former drummer for heavy metal band Judas Priest was jailed Friday for eight years for the attempted rape of a teenager while giving him drum lessons.

David Holland was convicted last month of one charge of attempted rape and five counts of indecent assault on the 17-year-old youth, who has learning difficulties, at the drummer’s rural English home in 2002.

Sentencing Holland in Northampton Crown Court, Judge Charles Wide said the drummer had planned the abuse and must never again be allowed to work with children.

Holland, 55, denied the charges.

Wide said that Holland had misrepresented himself to the boy’s parents as a beneficial influence and won favor with the teenager by giving him cigarettes, alcohol and pornography.

“You deliberately and calculatedly planned and executed a strategy of abusing a boy who you knew to be exceptionally vulnerable,” Wide said.

Prosecutors said during the trial that the teenager, who had sometimes stayed overnight at Holland’s house while taking lessons, wrote a letter to his parents in December 2002 describing the abuse.

Holland joined Judas Priest in 1979 and stayed for a decade, through its most successful period. The hard-rocking British band churned out a string of heavy-metal classics, including “You’ve Got Another Thing Coming,” “Living After Midnight” and “Hell Bent for Leather.”

Holland left the group in 1989.

Courtesy of Associated Press