The actor Chris Langham was remanded in custody last night after a jury convicted him of downloading child pornography.The jury, which also acquitted the 58-year-old of indecently assaulting a 14-year-old girl in a London hotel, rejected his claim that he downloaded pornography – including images of seven-year-olds being sexually abused, raped and tortured – as part of his research for the BBC series, Help.
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/legal/article2831105.eceAlso see:
Dark secret that ended a resurgent acting career
When Chris Langham was questioned by police shortly after his arrest he compared himself to Charles Dickens. In a prepared statement which he read to detectives he said he had downloaded the graphic images of child abuse because he was an artist “condemned to feel the pain for all of us and try and express it”.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/crime/article/0,,2140721,00.htmlLangham found guilty of child porn charges
Actor convicted on charges of making indecent photograph of a child but acquitted of sexually assaulting underage girl
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article2189520.eceChris Langham facing jail over child porn
Chris Langham, the award-winning comic actor and scriptwriter, is in jail after being found guilty of downloading pornographic images of children being abused. The 58-year-old comedian, who was acquitted by a jury of eight charges of sexually assaulting a schoolgirl, now faces up to 10 years in prison for viewing paedophile videos and photographs on his computers at his farmhouse home near Cranbrook, Kent.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/08/02/nlangham402.xmlCOMMENT: Langham: Caught in Operation Ore’s net
On the very evening that reports first appeared about an international crackdown on child pornography, Chris Langham contacted police over his “concern” that he was receiving spam emails with links to paedophile sites.Little did he know then that, because of a credit card transaction he had made on a porn site three years earlier, the forces of law and order already had him in their sights.According to the prosecution, Langham only contacted the police in May, 2002, because he “panicked” when he learnt of the scope of Operation Ore – a US-led crackdown in Internet child pornography – and “wanted to give the impression of being a good citizen”. By then, though, it was already too late for him.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/08/02/nlangham202.xml