He was the charismatic frontman of exciting and wildly successful band Lostprophets – and she was a besotted fan. So when Joanne Mjadzelics first got to meet and then actually hook up with rockstar Ian Watkins, it seemed to be a dream come true.
Instead, meeting Watkins would turn into a nightmare which she could only finally escape after spending years forcing herself to listen to his twisted fantasies in order to bring him to justice.
Now, ten years after she was finally vindicated for her key role in unmasking Watkins, leading to him being imprisoned for 35 years, Joanne has revisited the memories for the first time to tell her extraordinary and frequently disturbing story.
Joanne, now 50, told MailOnline this week: ‘It literally felt like it was me against the world.’
Her story begins in Yorkshire in early 2006 where she was working as a telephone banking assistant in Yorkshire when a colleague loaned her a CD by a band she thought she might like.
The Lost Prophets had been around for almost a decade at this point so they were hardly unknown but their big breakthrough – which would see them go platinum, fill stadiums and sell 3.5 million albums worldwide – was still ahead of them.
The friend’s instincts were right – she liked what she heard enough to think she might want to see them live, only to find all their gigs were sold out.
So she left a message on the band’s website hoping she might somehow get to the tour.
Ian Watkins, the charismatic frontman of the once exciting and wildly successful band Lostprophets
Joanne Mjadzelics – the ex-girlfriend of paedophile Lostprophets singer Ian Watkins – is pictured outside Cardiff Crown after being cleared of six charges
The pair’s messages became increasingly flirtatious, culminating in Watkins asking to meet her on their tour before Christmas in 2006
When she received an email reply from Watkins himself – the singer who she already had a big crush on – she could initially hardly believe it was genuine.
She recalls now: ‘Ian responded asking me to add him on MSM [then a popular early social media platform] and that’s when we started chatting.’
The messages became increasingly flirtatious, culminating in Watkins asking to meet her on their tour before Christmas in 2006.
Joanne says: ”We were chatting on and off and then eventually I met him after he put me on the guest list for his Leeds show. I arranged to meet him at my hotel before the show and that is when it all started.’
She slept with him that first night – and that was the starting point for what would become an intense but sporadic affair in which Joanne would soon realise she was just one of many women Watkins had on the go, many like her whom he had cherry picked from their fanbase.
But it was 18 months into their on/off relationship that Watkins – now 47 – began to confide his increasingly dark sexual fantasies and, worse, encourage Joanne to share them.
And their depravity levels soon escalated.
He spoke about his fantasy of taking a 14-year-old fan’s virginity.
Ian Watkins even dated Fearne Cotton as his band went platinum
Then he singled out an 11-year-old girl he said he would like to have sex with.
Then he started talking about a four-year-old child he described as ‘super flirty’.
Before he began this descent into the moral abyss, Watkins had groomed smitten Joanne by telling her he wanted to have a baby with her.
Now he even expected her to listen while he described how he wanted to have sex with their imaginary daughter.
Initially she was distressed by his twisted fantasies but wasn’t sure what she could do – but when he began to show her what were clearly illegal graphicly sexual paedophilic images, she decided she had to act.
She recalls now: ‘In the beginning there were feelings. I was so in love with that man but then, as time went on, and I found out who he really was, those feelings went away immediately and I knew I had to report him to the police.’
Joanne first contacted the authorities local to his home in Wales, speaking to South Wales Police and both Pontypridd Child Services and Rhondda Children’s Services in December 2008.
South Wales Police arranged for Joanne to be interviewed by two officers at her home in Bingley, West Yorkshire, the following March.
She thought this would lead to Watkins’ immediate arrest and prosecution but instead she was horrified to learn the force had closed the case against him. They did not believe her.
Joanne is the first to concede she had a somewhat troubled life: after serving in the army, she had a child but her relationship failed leaving her a single mother with no income.
She had worked for a time as a lapdancer and then later as an escort before trying to leave that seedy world by landing that banking role.
She believes that it was her frankness with those police officers that led them to so quickly discount her account and take Watkins’ side – dismissing her as what she calls ‘just a nut job prostitute’.
After contacting the police led nowhere, Joanne was increasingly concerned that Watkins might harm a real child.
At this point she took the only other course she could think of: she contacted a member of Watkins’ family to warn them about his paedophilia.
Joanne Mjadzelics arrives at Cardiff crowd, aged 39 at the time, while Ian Watkins heard charges related to child sex offences
Instead of leading to action, this saw her warned off by police, accused of possible harassment.
By now so many people – including, repeatedly, Watkins himself – had told her she was mistakenly conflating what was just sexualised chat with real criminality, that she began to doubt herself.
And finally veteran groomer Watkins was even able to persuade Joanne to meet him again – only this time it would take hours not months for her to realise that she had been right to walk away before.
This definitive turning point came in August 2010 when Watkins was again near her Yorkshire home as Lost Prophets were one of the headline acts at Leeds Festival.
By now the band were at the height of their success, with their last two albums respectively going to number one and going platinum and Watkins even dated stars like Fearne Cotton.
Joanne agreed to meet him at his hotel – only to find he was almost immediately trying to introduce her to his world of sexualising children again.
Still shaking at the memory, Joanne recalls: ‘He opened his laptop and I can say the girl was about six or seven – I am not going to describe it – and I looked at him and could feel the tears in my eyes
‘And he had this smirk on his face, an evil smirk on his face, as if he was getting off on the fact it was upsetting me.
‘It was at that point I told him he had to get out.
‘I had been starting to think I had been wrong about him. He had been trying to make me feel guilty for reporting him.
‘But I wasn’t wrong.’
In 2010 the band were at the height of their success, with their last two albums respectively going to number one and going platinum
It would take years before successful prosecution meant Watkins’ decade and a half on the rockstar pedestal was over
Joanne threw him out of his own hotel room and told him to sleep on the tour bus.
She wanted to go straight to police but they had already warned her she could get in serious trouble for harassment if she made any more complaints against him.
Incredibly, at this point, despite knowing she despised him and wanted him in prison, Watkins couldn’t resist goading her again.
In May 2011, in the middle of the night, Watkins began messaging her again, from Los Angeles, where Lostprophets were playing.
He once again began telling her sordid stories, this time revolving around a six year old girl – accompanying his account with graphic images, Joanne reported him to the police once again but nothing was done.
It was at this point that – despite that police harassment warning – Joanne’s revulsion overcame her fear of getting herself into trouble.
And she took an extraordinary decision: if what she had presented to police last time had not been evidentially sound enough to persuade them to arrest Watkins, she would play along with him until he had incontrovertibly incriminated himself.
But she took what she thought was the insurance precaution of formally alerting the authorities to her plan, emailing the Association of Chief Officers to explain what she was proposing to do and even begging them for help.
She recalls now: ‘I told them: ‘I have agreed to all sorts of disgusting things to try to keep him on side and trap him and bring him to justice, can you please help me?’
‘I was begging them to help me.’
To persuade them of how serious the situation was she even attached screenshots of graphic messages she had received from Watkins where he fantasised about kidnapping and raping children.
But once again her warnings were ignored.
She decided to press on regardless and began to let Watkins regularly share his disturbing fantasies – using the separation techniques she had previously learned while working as an escort to try to avoid the extreme situation seeping over to taint her own family life.
But it was hard not to be affected psychologically, she says.
By early 2012, she was convinced she had enough material that was so damning that Watkins would be looking at years in prison.
Between March and May that year she visited Doncaster Police Station on three separate occasions, taking her laptop with her each time, to try to get any police officer to take her reports on Watkins seriously.
Despite the clearly gravely disturbing and clearly criminal material she had in her hands, none would.
‘They acted as if I was some crazy stalker,’ she recalls.
Undaunted, she tried to report Watkins to a third police force: Bedfordshire, where a fan lived who had a baby Watkins said he planned to abuse.
This time, the police finally paid some attention: they arranged to interview Watkins – but he was soon released on bail.
In December 2012 an unrelated drugs tip-off led to a police raid on his home.
As a matter of routine they seized his laptop and, as soon as they turned it on, the penny finally dropped with police that Watkins was everything Joanne had repeatedly told them – and worse.
Detectives had discovered on his laptop 90 indecent images of children between the ages of two to 14 and 22 other images of bestiality.
This was punctuated with use of what had become his catchphrase: ‘mega lolz’ – meaning very funny.
But, detectives would finally discover, these images were just the visible manifestation of what it would transpire he had been playing out for real – just as Joanne had repeatedly warned.
A year later Watkins finally admitted 13 sex offences, including the attempted rape of a baby and attempted sexual assault of a child under the age of 13.
His decade and a half on the rockstar pedestal was over, and he would now be joining the pantheon of the UK’s very worst sex offenders.
Watkins was jailed for 29 years with a further six on licence.
Two female accomplices, who cannot be named for legal reasons, were jailed alongside him.
Joanne assumed that his conviction and imprisonment would finally mark the end of her distressing involvement with the singer – and see her fully vindicated. And initially this appeared to be the case.
She remembers: ‘After he pleaded guilty I got a call from two of the officers in the case who told me ‘We can’t thank you enough, we would not be where we are today if it wasn’t for you’,
‘That was their exact words. It was all celebrations and everything.’
But her ordeal wasn’t over – not by any means.
First, she was tortured by the knowledge that he could have been stopped before he could actually abuse any child.
Joanne, weeping, recalls: ‘After he was arrested it hit me so hard and I kept asking: why didn’t the police do anything? What did I do wrong? Why didn’t they do anything sooner?
‘And I kept thinking about all his victims who should have been helped over the four years after I first went to the police.
‘The police were in his pocket. He had them wrapped around his little finger for four years. For four years they did nothing and so after he was arrested it hit me like a cannonball in the stomach, the realisation of everything.’
These feelings led Joanne to reveal publicly that she had reported Watkins’ behaviour in 2008, 2009, 2011 and 2012 and nothing had been done, causing public outrage.
After saying her piece, Joanne was finally ready to put the last five years of her life behind her and try to move on.
But now the police suddenly were interested – in her.
In March 2014, Doncaster Police raided her house, arresting her in relation to Watkins’ case for the possession and distribution of indecent images and seizing her possessions.
‘I said to them: ‘Are you really arresting me for those images on my laptop I have taken to the police station four times?’
They tipped my son, who was 17 at the time, out of his bed and took his computer as well.
‘I was in that cell for 12 hours.
‘The whole thing was f***ing awful. I was f***ing traumatised.’
Despite her protestations, Joanne was later charged and eventually, in January 2015, put on trial at Cardiff Crown Court.
After a two week trial, she was soon cleared of all charges by the jury.
She called it at the time ‘a vicious prosecution’ – and as she looks back ten years on, her view has not altered.
She says today: ‘I shouldn’t ever have been there – I was put on trial just for doing the job that the police couldn’t be a***ed to do themselves.
‘Do I regret meeting him? Yes, I regret meeting him… but if I hadn’t met him then no-one would have reported him and maybe he’d never have been caught.
‘So in that sense I can’t regret anything because I was the one who kept going back and going back and reporting and reporting it.
‘I felt that I was the only person who saw through his public face of a charming and charismatic musician,’ she later added.
‘If just one child was saved, then it was worth the hell I’ve gone through.’
The effects of those years trying to catch Watkins have undeniably taken a devastating toll however.
She now suffers from PTSD, self-harms and is agoraphobic – all conditions she attributes to Watkins and the mishandling of his case.
This has been exacerbated by hateful abuse she has faced from a small but devoted number of disturbed fans who continue to support Watkins.
All of this means, she says, she is now fearful to go outside and is unable to form any intimate relationships,
‘It really f***ed me up, everything I had to see and hear from him,’ she says.
‘I get flashbacks of being with him. There is so much horror that can be dragged up.’
Speaking from her home near Doncaster, where she lives alone, Joanne says: ‘Doing the right thing really backfired on me, didn’t it? It literally felt like me against the world.
‘And the way the police treated me could put other people off coming forward.
‘They said I wasn’t the perfect witness but who is the perfect witness?
‘They thought I wasn’t the perfect witness because of the job I once did and all that.
‘But who else but someone like me could get all that information and deal with it?
Joanne Mjadzelics, then aged 38, former girlfriend of paedophile rock star Ian Watkins, leaves Cardiff Crown Court
Three years after Watkins was jailed and Joanne was completely acquitted, an investigation by the Independent Office for Police Complaints (IOPC) found there had been a number of missed opportunities over a four year period to arrest Watkins.
If those opportunities had been taken at the time, it could have saved some children from abuse, the report concluded.
It also found that a simple check of one of Joanne’s devices when she made her complaints in Doncaster would have clearly shown Watkins sexual interest in children.
But police had not examined them because they believed Joanne’s initial reports in 2008 and 2009 had been ‘malicious’.
Yorkshire Police later apologised to Joanne for her mistreatment but she says she has never had an apology from South Wales Police.
Watkins is currently held at the notorious maximum security HMP Wakefield prison alongside the likes of murderer Jeremy Bamber.
One final irony, Joanne says, is that although she was portrayed at the time as a superfan, in fact the first night she met the band was the only time she ever saw them live and she never really liked their music – just quite liked that loaned CD and initially found their singer attractive.
Until she found out what he was really like.
She says: ‘I was never a fan of theirs – that was the only gig of theirs I went to but it just wasn’t for me so I didn’t go again.’
