We all want to believe we know our friends, the people we work with daily and especially the people we date, but no one ever REALLY knows everything going on inside a person’s head. And so it was with the sick and twisted mind of Ian Watkins, who was sentenced in December 2013 to 29-35 years in prison after pleading guilty to a series of charges of sexual acts with children along with two defendants, who just happened to be former groupies of the 36-year-old lead singer’s band Lostprophets…and the mother of the babies involved. Yes, you read that right – BABIES.
According to a new interview in The Sunday Times, guitarists Mike Lewis and Lee Gaze say they have no interest in reconnecting with Watkins. Lewis, who has a young daughter, has known Watkins since they were five. Gaze, who is a father-of-two met him as a 15-year-old.
“I’ve thought about it long and hard and, no, I have no interest in ever speaking to him again,” stated Lewis.
Gaze said, “I feel incredibly bad for his mother and his whole family and the stigma they have to endure now because of what he’s done and what his actions have done to hurt many people. But I have no interest in questioning him about it. Never. I don’t think I’d get the answers I wanted and I don’t know what knowing answers to certain questions would give me now either.”
“I tried reading the judge’s report. I couldn’t even finish it,” said Lewis. “To think that somebody I grew up with, who I had been friends with my entire life, whose mother I knew, and how close our families were — to even imagine him… I find it utterly unbelievable that he was capable of doing those things. Obviously he did, but how somebody can…I don’t understand it, I’m afraid.”
Although the band knew that Watkins was struggling with drug addiction, Gaze said that there was “was absolutely nothing that led us to suspect what he’d done” and that they were all “shocked beyond comprehension” after the arrest. Watkins continued to lie and denied the allegations to his bandmates and to the Court.
“He was always surrounded by all these women, so it just seemed impossible,” he said.
As for how the band was blindsided by the accusations and eventual arrest, Lewis revealed, “I couldn’t believe it. I thought he was a lot of things — a drug addict, a womanizer. But I never, ever believed that of him. My first assumption was that maybe there was a mistake … He was very, very secretive with us about the women he was seeing and any kind of relationship he had.”
Gaze held nothing back discussing his long time friend. He explained, “He’s a bit of a coward — not a tough guy by any means. To be in prison, where he’s going to be the guy from the rock band with those charges, I was worried. But then I reached a point where real resentment set it.” Gaze stated that Watkins tried to convince the band he was being set up and that someone was trying to get revenge on him.
“[Ian] spent the longest time trying to convince us that somebody was trying to get revenge on him,” recalled Gaze. “He’d created such a web of people, bouncing these women off each other, that it was perfectly feasible that one of these women hated him so much that she wanted to catch him out.”
Karen Ruttner – who dated Watkins for years, before becoming a part of the Lostprophets management team after their relationship ended – “cried every day for three months” following his guilty plea. She has been undergoing therapy to help her deal with what’s happened, according to a separate interview with The Sunday Times.
Retner discussed Watkins’ drug addiction in the article, recalling that when she saw him in April 2012, the same month the attempted rape of a baby at the K West Hotel in London had taken place. “That month was probably the worst I ever saw him. He was disgusting, so messed up. He was starting to have issues with his teeth falling out and rotting.”
“This person that I had been so close with at that point, for six years, was… capable of this? I thought I knew when he was lying. “No, there were no alarm bells in our sex life,” she said. “I thought I knew what his demons were. This was not on the list of presumed demons.”
