Charlotte Metcalf

The Establishment paedophile: how a monster hid in high society

Roger Took was a pillar of academia, with an enviable Chelsea address. He was also a vicious paedophile. Charlotte Metcalf shows how the veneer of social respectability can protect even the worst offenders

issue 12 July 2008

The five-year-old girl cowers naked and crying in a corner. She is so frightened that she urinates. One of the men in the room hits her repeatedly. The others laugh. Another man picks her up and throws her face down on the bed. Then the men rape her. She dies soon afterwards of atrocious injuries.

This is the scenario that the respected art historian and curator, Roger Took, boasted repeatedly about in internet ‘chat rooms’ to fellow paedophiles. In the chat rooms, Took relates how a Dutch man bought the child in Cambodia, kept her for a week and how Took was part of the group who enjoyed ‘splitting her apart’ one night. After Took was arrested last April, the police interviewed him in connection with the child’s murder but Took insisted it was mere fantasy and the police passed the case on to Interpol. Fantasy it could be, but the fact so many like-minded men laughed and masturbated over a helpless child’s torture, terror and death is chilling and profoundly disturbing.

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