A multi-millionaire football club owner known as Britain’s first gay father has been charged with rape and human trafficking. The Telegraph has more.
Barrie Drewitt-Barlow, 57, and his husband, Scott, 32, are accused of several offences, including rape, sexual assault and modern slavery trafficking for sexual exploitation.
The couple, who own non-league Maldon and Tiptree FC, were due to appear at Chelmsford Magistrates’ Court on Friday morning.
Their football club were set to be the subject of a six-part ITV documentary premiering next Wednesday but this has now been scrapped.
That followed the Drewitt-Barlows’ arrest on Wednesday, a raid on the couple’s mansion in Southwood Chase, Danbury, and searches of the football club – who were forced to abandon plans to host council election polling – and The Swan pub in Braintree.
A Rolls Royce was loaded on to the back of a trailer and taken away for examination.
The pub and vehicle are owned by Barrie who in 1999 was part of one of the first gay couples – along with then-husband Tony – to be named as same-sex parents on the birth certificates of their children born via a surrogate.
Barrie, a property developer, went on to star in reality TV shows including Rich House, Poor House and Below Deck Sailing Yacht.
His and his current husband’s arrest came a little over a month after ITV announced it would air a documentary called Up The Jammers, charting their attempt at football ownership.
It was due to follow “every twist and turn of Barrie Drewitt-Barlow’s dive into the unknown” after he bought Maldon and Tiptree.
However, it was hastily removed from the schedules for ITV4 and ITVX following a statement from Essex Police on Wednesday that said they had arrested a 57 year-old man “on suspicion of: rape, human trafficking for sexual exploitation and administering a noxious substance” and a 32 year-old man on suspicion of the same offences.
“Both men remain in custody where they are being questioned by detectives,” the statement said.
Detective Inspector Lydia George, who led the investigation, said: “If anyone has any information they feel ready to share with us, I would ask them to contact us via the Major Incident Public Portal (MIPP) and the investigation team will provide you with any specialist support required.”
Worth reading in full.
Discussion
Comments
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‘husband’
One look at this perv tells me all I need to know.
For me, one look was one too many. Ugh!
Wrong Un…
“Barrie Drewitt-Barlow, 57, and his husband, Scott, 32”. I will never get used to a man referring to ‘his husband’, (or a woman referring to ‘her wife’). Is it not a classic oxymoron?
Maldon has always seemed a very pleasant place when we’ve visited
Nice roller rink and an excellent pizza restaurant
Love is love, eh?
People on drugs having anonymous anal sex with each other in rooms with little or nor light is about as much love as it is tennis.
I will never understand how a man inserting himself into another man’s waste disposal unit can be called ‘love’.
You don’t have to look far for examples of gay male couples acquiring babies via surrogacy. This couple have just obtained their third child;
”LGBTQI+ influencer poses alongside his husband and their new surrogate baby boy. Joseph Hughes has collected his third surrogate child from the hospital after being accused of using his surrogate babies for social media clicks.”
https://x.com/OliLondonTV/status/2050904064146477237
In my comment I was thinking more about:
On the other subject of surrogacy:
I too don’t like surrogacy. I very much hope that all who do obtain a child this way (or any other way for that matter) will love and nurture the child but I fear that some of these children are off to a very poor start.
It makes me wonder if those children will be influenced to join the alphabetti brigade. Rightly or wrongly, it sickens me.
There’s plenty of heterosexual woke parents who are transing their kids because they’re fully onboard with this gender politics lark. I’d still say it’s mindset over one’s sexuality which is most important in being a decent parent. It’s possible to be gay and not woke.
I should clarify: I’m referring to gay couples in general, not the surrogacy part, which is certainly unethical and gross. Especially when those children are being used as props to garner attention and revenue on social media, which seems to be the case in the above example.
Are there any others that think that allowing ‘couples’ who are physically not able to breed to get children is a form of child abuse on those children who have no choice in being presented with an unnatural relationship with 2 dads or 2 mums?
Yes. I agree.
I’d go further. No extreme interventions for barren couples. No IVF on the NHS.
I don’t have an issue with two lesbians having children as long as one of them is the biological mother, as opposed to a baby being torn from its mother at birth and placed with strangers, and even if one man is the biological father due to him donating his sperm, he won’t have been able to bond with that baby at all in the nine months its been gestating, unlike the mother who’s been carrying it. I just oppose surrogacy generally.
This article has more, with a focus on single men being able to acquire a baby via surrogacy;
”Should single men be allowed to buy a baby? Obviously not, you might think. But since 2019 British men have been legally allowed to obtain a child though the surrogacy process.
When a baby is born to a surrogate, they are often taken from their mother shortly afterwards, to prevent infant and mother bonding (in this country it is illegal to take a puppy from its mother before it is eight weeks old). A man can then apply for a ‘parental order’, in which a court will legally make them the child’s parent, without the full checks which an adoption… Read more »
Agreed.
It feels wrong to me
I don’t think everything that’s wrong should necessarily be prohibited by the state though. I think consenting adults should be free to regulate their own lives beyond the obvious prohibitions on criminal acts. Once children come into play it becomes more awkward. Of course some heterosexual couples are terrible parents
I can’t come up with a coherent rationale for stopping it right now, but I agree it seems wrong
What we need ( and it possibly already exists, if I was sufficiently interested to check ) is some sort of research done to see if there’s any detrimental long-lasting effects on kids’ development if they were brought up by same sex parents versus heterosexual parents. Probably best to split the ‘same sex’ category into both parents being gay men and also lesbians. I always wonder how it must be for girls being brought up by two men and boys by lesbians, as our same sex parent is our primary role model growing up.
Because you’re right. There’s hetero couples who’ve literally damaged their kids beyond repair and kids have incurred long lasting psychological side effects, especially if they’ve ended up in the care system due to a dysfunctional family set-up.
High profile gay couples include Elton John and his partner, Tom Daley and his partner, so I wonder how their kids fared. But it’d be interesting to look into this because, ultimately, is it not enough for kids to just be brought up by parents who love them and meet all of their requirements throughout the various stages of their development? So I don’t know if it’s fair to… Read more »
I got curious. I’m not much cop at critiquing studies so whether these are decent quality or not, there does appear to be a consensus that kids brought up by same sex parents don’t have any worse outcomes than those in a heterosexual household. So it would seem the individual parenting is more important than the sexual orientation of the parents;
”We identified 79 scholarly studies that met our criteria for adding to knowledge about the well-being of children with gay or lesbian parents. Of those studies, 75 concluded that children of gay or lesbian parents fare no worse than other children. While many of the sample sizes were small, and some studies lacked a control group, researchers regard such studies as providing the best available knowledge about child adjustment, and do not view large, representative samples as essential.
We identified four studies concluding that children of gay or lesbian parents face added disadvantages. Since all four took their samples from children who endured family break-ups, a cohort known to face added risks, these studies have been criticized by many scholars as unreliable assessments of the well-being of LGB-headed households.
Taken together, this research forms an overwhelming scholarly consensus, based on… Read more »
These days you may struggle to find an “impartial” study. But yes, it would be instructive to see some evidence.
See above.
It boils down to prohibiting (or not) people from adopting children (because that’s what they’re doing) based on their current sexual preferences and there’s simply no justification for that which would hold water. Whether or not someone’s a suitable mother or father of an adopted child should depend on the behaviour
towards the child and not on spare-time activites undertaken together with other
adults.
NB: My entirely subjective feeling about this is “Uhh, icky, innit?” But that’s just based on my (rather theoretical) sexual preferences being different. I don’t think that’s a sound base for judging someone’s behaviour about something completely different.
I think we’re back to where we usually end up in that if people can actually park their prejudices at the door and see people as individuals, as opposed to tar entire groups of people with the same brush based on one’s bias, we’ll see that it’s a case of parenting skills being independent of one’s sexuality which is of paramount importance. But I think this is another area where many find it difficult to be objective.
I would say as long as the parents aren’t woke and into all this gender identity BS then their sexual orientation is neither here nor there and has no bearing on their abilities to parent effectively.
Yes, see my reply to RW above/below.
You make some good points but my “objection” to same-sex parents is not the sexual preference bit but the instinctive feeling that it’s better to have man and a woman working together to bring up children, because they will tend on average to balance each other’s extremes and get the child very familiar with someone of both sexes. I have no evidence for this leading to “better” outcomes (whatever they are) other than instinct and somewhat basic logic. I think homosexuality is kind of weird* but beyond that I don’t have strong feelings about it. *We are odd creatures anyway.
The weird bit is just a cultural prejudice (both a Germanic and a Christian/ Jewish one). The ancient Greeks and Romans knew nothing of that. Eg, in the Anabasis, Xenophon just reports that some of his men prefer takinh young female ‘prisoners’, some, young male ones and some both.
It’s also pointless to decree something which cannot be enforced. It’s impossible to stop people who like same-sex encounters from adopting children unless there’s 24×7 surveillance of everyone everywhere. As this means they will be adopting children if they want that, this simply needs to be dealt with.
Personal preferences notwithstanding, I’m absolutely convinced that the state should stay out of people’s bedrooms (and locations serving similar purposes).
Also of note, and this goes out to the homophobes and people who find same-sex relationships distasteful, there are loads of examples from the animal kingdom of this behaviour, too. On the surface you’d think this is a bit irrational because the assumption is that animals would be all about the survival of the species, and same-sex relationships/mating just isn’t conducive to procreation, but the facts say otherwise.
Hell, I’ll bet cavemen and women were also at it back in the day, although finding supporting evidence for this might prove challenging. But if animals have always done it ( apparently 45% of elephant sexual interactions are same-sex ) then the likelihood is that humans have done it since the dawn of time, too.
So this refutes the argument that being gay is somehow ‘unnatural’, which I suspect is largely driven by religion. It’s not unnatural at all, just different to what the prevailing wisdom/dogma dictates is the norm;
”Same-sex coupling and parenting has been observed in animals for centuries. Over 1,500 animal species engage in same-sex sexual behavior, which can help maintain the health of a species’ population.Take a 1910 scientific exploration in Antarctica, where these behaviors were seen in… Read more »
As always you make some good/interesting points.
“It’s also pointless to decree something which cannot be enforced” I would generally agree with that if by “cannot be enforced” you mean it’s NEVER enforced either because people don’t want to or because it’s practically difficult. But illegal stuff happens all the time and lots of people don’t get caught and punished for it, but the stuff is still illegal. I believe the state should interfere as little in possible in people’s lives, but this position gets difficult where children are concerned. I generally think that the state should not interfere in parenting matters either, but we don’t let parents neglect their children to the point that they are obviously severely harmed. If the state has a legitimate interest in protecting children then it’s not a stretch to say that it should regulate adoption (which it does).
Could you perhaps provide a comprehensive definition of “gay” which could form the base of prohibiting people matching the definition from adopting children.
Is a man who only had sex with other men so far gay?
Is a man who usually has sex with women but sometimes, also with men gay?
Is a man who’s married to a woman but had a same-sex relationship in the past gay?
Is a man who once had an intoxicated same-sex encounter in the past gay?
Is a man who had such an enounter yesterday gay?
What if it was a year ago?
What if it was ten years ago?
What if he adopts a child today and the encounter will occur next week?
What about people from the swinger scene who have mixed-sex orgies where men at least come into very close physical contact with each other?
What about a man who was in a same-sex relationship until he encountered the woman he’s together with now?
Bonus question: What about people who are into roleplaying involving torture? That’s not quite the kind of hobby that’s particularly suitable for minors, either.
Why should people have to declare all these details about their perfectly private… Read more »
As I said before*, my “objection” (not a particularly strong one) is nothing to do with sexual preferences, it’s to do with the couple doing the adopting being both of the same sex, preventing the child from being closely exposed to one parent of each sex. As far as I know in the UK, adoption is regulated and not a free for all. Potential parents are vetted, presumably based on their suitability. Given that humans have evolved as the product of two parents one of each sex, I think it’s perfectly legitimate to consider this as a possible criteria.
* my “objection” to same-sex parents is not the sexual preference bit but the instinctive feeling that it’s better to have man and a woman working together to bring up children
(see above)
You’re free to object to the fact that the sun rises in the east until the cow comes home but that’s not going to make the sun rise anywhere else.
What would you be planning to do about two heterosexual male singles sharing a house and one of them wants to adopt a child because he feels lonely?
I’d need to understand a lot more about the subject before having a firm opinion. My gut feeling is that it’s preferable for a child to have one parent of each sex. I think the business of adoption is necessarily fraught. Children are not chattel and they sometimes need protecting by someone other than their biological parents. How you decide who is suitable to take on the role of a parent is going to be messy.
What I will add, just based on my observations, is that usually religious beliefs ( in the context of this site, mainly Christian ) immediately cause bias. You see it across different contexts. I am not religious, therefore I think I’m able to be more objective than most. There’s a lot of people display a lot of prejudices on this site and it’s almost always from the Christians.
Todays headlines:
“City Firms Still Allow Male Trans Staff to Use Women’s Toilets”
“The Case Against Industrial-Scale Solar in the UK”
“The Independence of the Banksy of England”
These all show how the West is being destroyed by lunatic far-left propaganda.
In a normal world, anyone walking past a Banksy would think, ‘When is the council going to get rid of that graffiti?
In a normal world, anyone walking past a Banksy would think, ‘When is the council going to get rid of that graffiti?
Seconded. I’m still occasionally annoyed by the one on the wall of the former HMP Reading. If the something considers itself a painter, it should restrict itself to exhibiting its painting to people who actually want to see them.
Husband?
Bum chum??
Indeed.
I’m 59. If someone in my twenties had told me that in a few decades two men would be able to “marry” in some sort of state-approved pretend marriage and call each other “husband” and “husband”, I would have thought the guy had lost his mind.
It has always been a bit of a mystery to me quite why anyone would want to belong to a club that didn’t want them?
Given that gay couples could, effectively, already tie the knot in a civil ceremony why did they then demand to be married in a church service when the church maintained that marriage was between a man and a woman?
The legislature should never have imposed its will upon the church pandering to self-centered individuals trying to make themselves feel ‘special’.
The aim is the denigration of marriage.
One episode that revealed the hidden intentions of these people was the case when a guy went to a Christian bakery and ordered a cake with “support gay marriage” on it.
He could have gone to a hundred different bakers who would not have cared.
But he had to go to that particular bakery.
Why?
It wasn’t about the cake.
It was about attacking a couple who had traditional views about marriage.
Only a few activists wanted it – the vast silent majority thought it was unnecessary and would be counterproductive. The then No 10 retard thought it would be good for his career and indeed claimed it was the highlight of his time as PM.
It originated with the UN.
I’m old enough to remember the days before homosexuality was elevated to some sort of special virtue.
The general feeling in the population was there there was a noticeable correlation between that inclination and paedophilia. Also, homosexuals had a reputation for extreme promiscuity.
Now I’m not saying there wasn’t an element of prejudice in this.
But we humans tend to notice patterns. For example a few of us have noticed that there appears to be some kind of correlation between Islam and terrorism.
I don’t like surrogacy and think it should be banned. It’s highly unethical. But these above allegations are concerning men over the age of 16yrs, from what I gleaned elsewhere;
“First time I interviewed the hideous Barry Drewitt-Barlow, in 2010, he told me he commands the “surrogates” having “his” children to have C-sections, because he found it “repulsive” to think of the babies coming out of a vagina.” Julie Bindel
Here he is saying he doesn’t want ugly babies. I wonder if he gave the model an offer she couldn’t refuse to be his surrogate. Also, what if the baby ends up looking like him anyway?🤔
https://x.com/i/status/2053016765970764151
“First time I interviewed the hideous Barry Drewitt-Barlow, in 2010, he told me he commands the “surrogates” having “his” children to have C-sections, because he found it “repulsive” to think of the babies coming out of a vagina.”
Presumably this guy also came out of a vagina, like most of us? (I certainly have. No disrespect for caesarean babies.)
All well nd good, but why bringing Julie B into it? She absolutely hates men, all men, straight, gay, bi, atheists, religious, short, tall…Julie loathes them all.Moreover, she is perfectly honest about it. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/nov/02/whyihatemen
It’s just something she posted in response to J.K Rowling on Twitter. I have no opinion on Julie because I don’t follow her or her work.
F&F disclosure. I was close to cancelling my DT subscription because she was relentlessly promoting week after week the assumption of female (chiefly lesbian) victimhood. She attracted not particularly flattering comments, with most readers suggesting that she should move to the Guardian. However, she has recently diverted her fire at trans men entering women’s spaces, and I found myself supporting her perspective.
A nice exercise in cherry-picking data.
These are cases reported in national newspaper, over the past 4 days, and there are more I did not include.
She names 9 such cases, 3 murders, 1 alleged murder, 2 rapes, 1 alleged rape, a beating and one man found not guilty of murder. That’s an odd compilation because beating someone is a much less serious crim than rape or murder and someone being found not guilty of murder isn’t a crime at all.
Someone should tell Julie Bindel that “Man kills girlfriend” is a newspaper story while “Man kisses girlfriend” isn’t, despite it certainly happens much more often. I also wouldn’t call her a man-hater. Just a propagandist trying to create huge stink based on nothing.
Agreed. Babies as fashion accessories is a repulsive concept.
I wonder what attracted husband Scott to that oil painting? I’m struggling to find anything of merit.
The “noticeable correlation” you refer to may have been connected to the tendency for them to exploit easy opportunities ie boarding schools; faith-based institutions (Catholic and C of E); the BBC and “fame.”
There is often a pattern of an older man partnering with a much younger one, as in this case: 25 years difference.
Agree. Think of the long list of diseases and health problems associated with male gay sex, in part due to extreme male promiscuity. It was frowned upon for good reason in the past and few talk about the health issues associated with homosexuality in the present.