Boy George has opened up about his shame of being convicted of assault, but admitted he has not apologised to his victim.
The Culture Club singer was sent to prison in 2009, when he was convicted of assault and false imprisonment of Norwegian model Audun Carlsen at his London flat.
Boy George - real name George O’Dowd - has now addressed his conviction in a candid chat with Piers Morgan for his ITV ‘Life Stories’ series, claiming he was having a a psychotic episode at the time of the assault in 2007.
He explained: “Now in hindsight I was having a psychotic episode, I was a drug addict, so I can’t really sit here and say that my reasons for doing it were founded in any way, I wasn’t sane.
“I stopped him from leaving my apartment so I did that, yes, that was what I got done for.
“It was terrible what I did and I’m absolutely ashamed and sorry about what I did but it’s been very difficult to talk about it, but what I did was wrong. It was wrong and I still pay the consequences for that now,” he said.
The star declined to give evidence in court during his trial, and explained that decision to Piers.
“I chose to just accept what was happening and for me I felt that was the dignified thing to do,” he said.
“When I went to trial, I was a year clean so I was already sober so that person I was in court and the person who had been arrested, they were two different people, plus I just didn’t want my mum to have to hear all this stuff in court.
“I just thought, ‘do you know what, I’m just going to accept it, I’m just going to accept the consequences of what happened,’ but one of the things that people don’t know is that I was prosecuted on my own evidence. I sent myself to prison.”
George was also quizzed on whether he has apologised to Audun Carlsen.
“I really don’t think that it would make any difference,” he said. “I always felt like not talking about it was dignified because I thought if I talk about it, I’m just going to hurt him, I’m going to hurt the people I love. Where’s the upside?”
Of the four months he spent in prison, he added: “I had friends that wrote to me every day, Stephen Fry wrote to me, I mean it was very humbling. I knew that I’d gotten very aware that I’d messed things up really badly and that I knew.
“I had a lot of work to do and so I’d kind of made the decision that once I’d got through it, that I was really going to put my life back together.”
‘Piers Morgan’s Life Stories’ airs on Friday 17 January at 9pm on ITV.
