Pianist James Rhodes wins right to publish autobiography telling of abuse

An internationally renowned classical pianist has overturned a ban that had prevented him from publishing his autobiography detailing the sexual abuse he suffered as a child.

The supreme court’s decision on Wednesday to sweep aside the injunction that prevented the book from appearing was hailed as a milestone in the defence of free speech.

The author – who could previously be identified only by the cipher MLA – can now be named as James Rhodes, a self-taught musician who has released four chart-topping albums.

Rhodes’ memoir details the very serious assaults he suffered as a young boy and the way in which music has helped him to deal with the trauma. However, his ex-wife sought to prevent publication of key passages, arguing that they would have too distressing an impact on their 12-year-old son.

The pianist was at court for the ruling, accompanied by his second wife, Hattie, and schoolfriend Benedict Cumberbatch, the actor. His fight for the right to tell his story has been backed by writers including David Hare, Michael Frayn, William Boyd and Tom Stoppard.

Rhodes said he wept as he read the ruling that anyone who had suffered in the way in which he did had the right to tell the world about it. It was “an amazing, resounding endorsement” of the right of sexual violence survivors to tell their stories, he said. “One of the hardest things has been the secrecy involved; not being able to talk about it directly or indirectly, the threat of imprisonment should I even reveal there was ongoing litigation.

“I’ve had to give concerts with all this hanging over me, not knowing if I was going to lose my house … feeling that I was being punished for something that was done to me 30 years ago. It made no sense to me that this could happen in Britain in 2015.”

Rhodes was repeatedly raped while a pupil at the junior school at Arnold House, a preparatory school for boys in St John’s Wood, north London. His abuser was a man called Peter Lee, who worked at the school part-time, as a boxing coach. Lee was recently arrested and charged, but died before he could be brought to trial.

The attacks left Rhodes with spinal damage and the trauma led to many years of addiction, self-harm and mental health problems for Rhodes.

A graphic passage in Rhodes’s memoir, quoted in the supreme court judgment, describes what happened to him:

“Abuse. What a word. Rape is better. Abuse is when you tell a traffic warden to fuck off. It isn’t abuse when a 40-year-old man forces his cock inside a six-year-old boy’s ass. That doesn’t even come close to abuse. That is aggressive rape. It leads to multiple surgeries, scars (inside and out), tics, OCD, depression, suicidal ideation, vigorous self-harm, alcoholism, drug addiction, the most fucked-up of sexual hang-ups, gender confusion (‘you look like a girl, are you sure you’re not a little girl?’), sexuality confusion, paranoia, mistrust, compulsive lying, eating disorders, PTSD, DID (the shinier name for multiple personality disorder) and so on and on and on.

“I went, literally overnight, from a dancing, spinning, gigglingly alive kid who was enjoying the safety and adventure of a new school, to a walled-off, cement-shoed, lights-out automaton. It was immediate and shocking, like happily walking down a sunny path and suddenly having a trapdoor open and dump you into a freezing cold lake”.”

Rhodes’ autobiography, entitled Instrumental, will be published next week. Interwoven with his account of rape and trauma is the story of the way in which he largely taught himself to read music and play the piano, and his relationship with music.

His autobiography reveals how now, at age 40, his intense relationship with music has helped him to make sense of the torment he has endured.

Writing for example about Bach’s chaconne for solo violin in D minor, transcribed for piano by Busoni, he says: “That piece became my safe place. Any time I felt anxious (any time I was awake) it was going round in my head. Its rhythms were being tapped out, its voices played again and again, altered, explored – experimented with. I dove inside it as if it were some kind of musical maze and wandered around happily lost. It set me up for life; without it I would have died years ago, I’ve no doubt.”

The case brought by Rhodes’ ex-wife hinged on an obscure piece of Victorian case law, known as Wilkinson v Downton, in which a man who played a practical joke on an east London pub landlady in 1897 was found to be guilty of the “intentional infliction of mental distress”.

After the high court rejected his wife’s request to have key parts of the book banned, she turned to the court of appeal, which imposed a temporary injunction last October, ruling that Wilkinson v Downton was engaged and that there should be a trial to decide whether or not the boy’s rights should take priority over those of his father.

The supreme court overturned that ruling on Wednesday after hearing an appeal from Rhodes. Delivering the judgment, Lord Toulson said: “Freedom to report the truth is a basic right to which the court gives a high level of protection and the author’s right to his story includes the right to tell it as he wishes.

“There is every justification for the publication. A person who has suffered in the way the appellant has suffered, and has struggled to cope with the consequences of his suffering in the way that he has struggled, has the right to tell the world about it. And there is the corresponding public interest in others being able to listen to his life story in all its searing detail.”

The court banned the publication of any information likely to lead to identification of the boy or any of his close relatives, other than Rhodes.

The pianist said: “Clearly this is a victory for freedom of speech. Much more importantly it is a powerful message to survivors of sexual abuse.

“There is already too much stigma and shame surrounding mental health and sexual abuse. I’m relieved that our justice system has finally seen sense and not only allowed me to tell my story, but affirmed in the strongest possible way: that speaking up about one’s own life is a basic human right.”

He was supported by the writers’ association English Pen and the free speech campaign groups Article 19 and Index on Censorship, which all argued that the appeal court ruling could have had a chilling effect on writers tackling difficult subjects if it were allowed to stand.

Last year, 20 leading writers, including Hare, Frayn, Boyd and Stoppard, wrote to the Daily Telegraph to say they were “gravely concerned about the impact of this judgment on the freedom to read and write in Britain”.

The writers’ and anti-censorship groups hailed the supreme court’s decision as an important verdict for free expression, and commended the court for its recognition that freedom to report the truth is a basic right protected in law.

Rhodes’ son is said to have Asperger’s, attention deficit disorder and other health problems. Rhodes disputes some of the assessments of the boy’s health.

Lawyers representing the boy and his mother denied that her case posed a threat to freedom of speech, saying it turned on the specific facts concerning a vulnerable child. They also argued that Rhodes had in the past recognised the need to protect his son from his own past history.

Following the couple’s divorce in 2009, the boy and his mother left the UK and settled in the country of her birth. Such has been the secrecy around the case that the court of appeal judgment described her as living in “Ruritania”, while their son was described as having “dual British and Ruritanian nationality”.