James Kirchick

Friday

James Kirchick

The British paedophile who’s still on the run

From our UK edition

In the current issue of the Spectator, I write about Warwick Spinks, a convicted British paedophile who hid in plain sight in Prague for some 15 years. In 1997, having already been released early from a 7-year (later reduced to 5-year) prison sentence delivered in 1995, Spinks violated the terms of his probation and fled the country. It was not long before he wound up in Prague, 'the Bangkok of Europe', where a series of British newspapers reported he was running sex tourism packages for gay men operating under the alias of 'Willem' and posing as a Dutch national. It was in this guise that I became acquainted with 'Willem', at least by reputation, as a ubiquitous and rather dodgy member of Prague's closely-knit expatriate gay community. Spinks was arrested by Czech police in August.

Thursday

James Kirchick

When the bloke in the bar turns out to be a paedophile

From our UK edition

To the British tabloids, he was ‘the Pied Piper of paedophiles’, the UK’s ‘most wanted child abuser’. But we all knew him as Willem: the fat, jolly, occasionally lecherous Dutchman who was a mainstay of Prague’s expatriate gay community. If you visited one of the city’s same-sex watering holes before last August, when Czech police arrested him, chances are that you would have seen, if not heard, the Pied Piper of Prague holding court at the end of the bar. ‘He liked his drugs, his drinks and his rent boys,’ one mutual friend, a young man I’ll name Thomas, recalls of Willem.

Thursday

James Kirchick

‘Vote for Romney and I’ll unfriend you’: why I won’t debate politics on Facebook

From our UK edition

On July 4, 2009, the day Sarah Palin announced that she would step down from the Governorship of Alaska, the perfect quip popped into my head. As we are wont to do in this age of social media, I immediately logged onto my Facebook account and typed the most famous line from Gerald Ford’s inauguration speech into the status update box: ‘Our long national nightmare is over.' Minutes later, a distant acquaintance (the older brother of a high school friend with whom I had long ago fallen out of touch), posted a comment that I found surprising given what I knew (from earlier Facebook comment discussions) to be his radically left-wing political views. ‘Look, I completely disagree with most of Palin’s politics,’ he wrote in the way of political throat clearing.