Pre-Assassination Moments : Dr. Khalid Abdul Muhammad, 1994

You Don't Take One Out Unless You Can Put One In.

You Don't Take One Out Unless You Can Put One In.

"Now, therefore, be it Resolved, That the House of Representatives

       (1) condemns the speech given by Kahlid Abdul Muhammad as 

     outrageous hatemongering of the most vicious and vile kind; "

"It is the sense of the Senate that the speech made by Mr. Khalid Abdul Mohammad at Kean College on November 29, 1993, was false, anti-Semitic, racist, divisive, repugnant and a disservice to all Americans and is therefore condemned."

Congressional Black Caucus Backs Away From Farrakhan

By STEVEN A. HOLMES,
Published: February 3, 1994

Bowing to pressure from his membership, the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus said today that his group was distancing itself from Louis Farrakhan and his black nationalist group, the Nation of Islam.

The chairman, Representative Kweisi Mfume, said that the 40-member caucus would back away from any working relationship with the black Muslim organization and Mr. Farrakhan until black members of Congress were satisfied that the Nation of Islam was moderating its views on whites, both Jews and gentiles.

A number of black politicians, including members of the caucus, have criticized Mr. Farrakhan in recent days for his failure to condemn anti-Semitic remarks by one of his chief lieutenants.

At a news conference today, Mr. Mfume said, "It is clear that the Congressional Black Caucus's ability to work for change with the Nation of Islam, as we do and will do with other organizations within the larger African-American community, is severely jeopardized as long as there remains a question by some of our membership about the Nation of Islam's sensitivity to the right of all people and all religions to be free from attacks, vilification and defamation."

Later this afternoon, the Senate voted 97 to 0 to condemn the anti-Semitic statements. The resolution was offered by Senators John C. Danforth, Republican of Missouri, and Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, as an amendment to an education bill. Possibility of Censure?

Mr. Mfume, Democrat of Maryland, hinted that Mr. Farrakhan might adopt a more conciliatory tone as early as Thursday, when he is to hold a news conference in Washington to comment on the speech by the aide, Khalid Abdul Muhammad, in which he attacked Jews, Catholics and homosexuals.

Without saying so, Mr. Mfume, who spoke with Mr. Farrakhan today, suggested that the head of the black Muslim group might censure Mr. Muhammad for remarks he made in November at Kean College in Union, N.J.

If Mr. Farrakhan does censure Mr. Muhammad, it would be a major shift for his organization, which has preached that whites are devils and that Jews were disproportionately involved in the African slave trade.

But some senior black members of Congress said that even if the Muslim organization moderated its views, the caucus would keep its distance. "There will be no future consideration of any kind of covenant with them," said Representative Major Owen, a Brooklyn Democrat.

Repeated calls to Mr. Farrakhan's office in Chicago went unanswered.

Today's statement by Mr. Mfume drew praise from the head of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, the Jewish group whose publication of Mr. Muhammad's remarks helped prompt black leaders to denounce the speech.

"I think that Congressman Mfume did the right thing," said Abraham H. Foxman, the league's national director. "I think he should be commended for his efforts to try to bring about the change in Reverend Farrakhan's position. Although I believe in epiphany, I'm not sure it will happen."

[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 16 (Wednesday, February 23, 1994)]

[House]

[Page H]

From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]

[Congressional Record: February 23, 1994]

From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

                              {time}  1410

EXPRESSING THE SENSE OF CONGRESS ON THE SENIOR REPRESENTATIVE OF THE  NATION OF ISLAM

  Mr. LANTOS. Mr. Speaker, pursuant to the order of the House of  Tuesday, February 22, 1994, I call up the resolution (H. Res. 343) to express the sense of the House of Representatives condemning the 

racist, anti-Catholic, and anti-Semitic speech given by a senior representative of the Nation of Islam and all manifestations and expressions of hatred based on race, religion, and ethnicity, and ask for its immediate consideration.

  The Clerk read the title of the resolution.

  The text of the resolution is as follows:

                               H.Res. 343

Whereas the United States House of Representatives strongly oppose racism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism, and all forms of ethnic or religious intolerance;

       

Whereas the racist, anti-Catholic, and anti-Semitic speech given by Kahlid Abdul Muhammad of the Nation of Islam at Kean College on November 29, 1993, incites divisiveness and violence on the basis of race, religion, and ethnicity; and

       

Whereas Mr. Muhummad specifically justifies the slaughter of Jews during the Holocaust a fully deserved; disparages the Pope in the most revolting personal terms; and calls for the assassination of every white infant, child, man, and woman in South Africa: 

Now, therefore, be it

       Resolved, That the House of Representatives

       (1) condemns the speech given by Kahlid Abdul Muhammad as 

     outrageous hatemongering of the most vicious and vile kind; 

     and

       (2) condemns all manifestations and expressions of racism, 

     anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism, and ethnic or religious 

     intolerance.

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Montgomery). The gentleman from 

California [Mr. Lantos] is recognized for 1 hour.

  Mr. LANTOS. Mr. Speaker, for purposes of debate only, I yield 30 

minutes to the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Hyde], and I ask unanimous 

consent that he be permitted to control the time on behalf of our 

Republican colleagues.

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the 

gentleman from California?

  There was no objection.

  Mr. LANTOS. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

  The purpose of this resolution is to express the sense of the House of Representatives condemning the racist, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, homophobic speech given by a senior representative of the Nation of Islam and to condemn all manisfestations and expressions of hatred and divisiveness in our country.

  Mr. Speaker, free speech is one of the greatest values of our free society, and all of us in this House are passionately committed to its preservation. The right to free speech, however, does not confer upon anyone the privilege of being immune from the free speech of others.

  When freedom of speech is abused in a vile and vicious way to promote hatred and to incite murder on a gigantic scale, it is the duty of responsible legislative bodies to condemn such speech in clear and 

uncertain terms.

  That is exactly, Mr. Speaker, what our colleagues in the other body did, when the Senate acted unanimously, every single Republican and every single Democrat, to repudiate and condemn the evil hate-mongering of the then-national spokesman for the Nation of Islam on a college 

campus.

  The Senate resolution, which is parallel to my resolution, reads as follows:

       It is the sense of the Senate that the speech made by Mr. 

     Khalid Abdul Mohammad at Kean College on November 29, 1993, 

     was false, anti-Semitic, racist, divisive, repugnant and a 

     disservice to all Americans and is therefore condemned.

  This is the moment, Mr. Speaker, for Members of the House of Representatives to stand up and be counted on what must be one of the most criminally vicious public incitements to hatred and mass murder ever offered on an American college campus. To say that this rambling and hate-filled diatribe is racist, sexist, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, and homophobic is true, of course, but it does not begin to 

convey the murderous venom which drips from every utterance. Just to use one set of examples from a speech, the transcript of which takes 62 pages, let me quote relevant portions relating to racism. I will omit the abusive language for obvious reasons.

  At a time when responsible black and white leaders in South Africa are engaged in the difficult task of building a democratic multiracial society, Khalid Abdul Mohammad issues a bloodthirsty call for mass 

murder.

     "  We kill the women. We kill the children. We kill the babies. We kill the blind. We kill the crippled. We kill them all. We kill the faggot. We kill the lesbian. We kill them all.

       Why kill the women? Because they lay on their back, they are the military or the army's manufacturing center. They lay  on their back and reinforcements roll out from between their legs. So we kill the women, too.

       You'll kill the elders, too? Kill the old ones, too. 

     Goddamit, if they are in a wheelchair, push them off a cliff in Capetown or Johannesburg. I said kill the blind, kill the crippled, kill the crazy. Goddamit. And when you get through killing them all, go to the goddamn graveyard and dig up the grave and kill them goddamn again, because they didn't die hard enough. They didn't die hard enough. And if you have killed them all and you don't have the strength to dig them up, then take your gun and shoot in the goddamn grave.

       Kill them again. Kill them again, because they didn't die hard enough. "

  Mr. Speaker, 62 pages of this dialog is not free speech. It is the 

opposite of free speech. It is an attempt to incite hatred and division 

in this complex, multiethnic, multireligious society, which has a 

difficult time, without these incitements to hate and murder, to 

function in a civil way.

  But we are not just dealing with events in this country. We are 

dealing with a daily diet of the evening news, mass rapes and ethnic 

cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, where 200,000 innocent civilians 

have been killed in the last 22 months because of words of hate and 

bigotry spoken in a similar vein.

  A few weeks ago, Mr. Speaker, six little children frolicking in the 

snow in Sarajevo were killed because of words of this kind. And 2 weeks 

ago, 68 innocent civilians, men, women and children, were killed in the 

open market of the city of Sarajevo.

  Now, there are colleagues in this House who might claim that these 

are mere words. Let me remind them that the Holocaust did not begin 

with the gas chambers. It began with words, words of hate and bigotry, 

calling for mass murder. And mass murder they did.

  Mr. Speaker, I ask that excerpts of the speech of Khalid Abdul 

Mohammad be placed in the Record, and I urge my colleagues to see the 

kind of vicious, hate-filled statements it contains.

Minister Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam Claim They Are Moving Toward Moderation and Increased Tolerance--You Decide

      " Brothers and sisters--the so-called Jew, and I must say so-

     called Jew, because you're not the true Jew. You are Johnny-

     come-lately-Jew, who just crawled out of the caves and hills 

     of Europe just a little over 4,000 years ago. You're not from 

     the original people. You are a European strain of people who 

     crawled around on all fours in the caves and hills of Europe 

     eating Juniper roots and eating each other.

       Who are the slumlords in the black community? The so-called 

     Jew who is sucking our blood in the black community. A white 

     imposter Arab and a white imposter Jew, right in the black 

     community, sucking our blood on a daily and consistent basis. 

     They sell us pork and they don't even eat it themselves. A 

     meat case full of rotten pork meat, and the imposter Arab and 

     the imposter white Jew, neither of them eat it themselves. A 

     wall full of liquor keeping our people drunk and out of their 

     head, and filled with the swill of the swine, affecting their 

     minds. They're the blood suckers of the black nation and the 

     black community. Professor Griff was right when he spoke 

     here--and when he spoke in the general vicinity of Jersey and 

     New York, and when he spoke at Columbia Jew-niversity (sic) 

     over in Jew (sic) York City. He was right.

       The DeBeers mines, Oppenheimer, our people, our brothers 

     and sisters in South Africa, hundreds of them lose their 

     lives. Sometimes thousands in those mines. Miles underground 

     mining diamonds for white Jews. That's why you call yourself 

     Mr. Reubenstein, Mr. Goldstein, Mr. Silverstein. Because you 

     been stealing rubies and gold and silver all over the earth. 

     That's why we can't even wear a ring or a bracelet or a 

     necklace without calling it Jew-erly We say it real quick and 

     call it jewelry, but it's not jewelry it's Jew-elry cause 

     you're the rogue that's stealing all over the face of the 

     planet earth.

       You see everybody always talk about Hitler exterminating 6 

     million Jews. That's right. But don't nobody ever ask what 

     did they do to Hitler. What did they do to them folks? They 

     went in there, in Germany, the way they do everywhere they 

     go, and they supplanted, they usurped, they turned around and 

     a German, in his own country, would almost have to go to a 

     Jew to get money. They had undermined the very fabric of the 

     society. Now he was an arrogant no-good devil bastard. 

     Hitler, no question about it. He was wickedly great. Yes, he 

     was. He used his greatness for evil and wickedness. But they 

     are wickedly great too, brother. Everywhere they go, and they 

     always do it and hide their head.

       We don't owe the white man nothin' in South Africa. He's 

     killed millions of our women, our children, our babies, our 

     elders. We don't owe him nothing in South Africa. If we want 

     to be merciful at all, when we gain enough power from God 

     Almighty to take our freedom and independence from him, we 

     give him 24 hours to get out of town, by sundown. That's all. 

     If he won't get out of town by sundown, we kill everything 

     white that ain't right (inaudible) in South Africa. We kill 

     the women, we kill the children, we kill the babies. We kill 

     the blind, we kill the crippled, (inaudible), we kill 'em 

     all. We kill the faggot, we kill the lesbian, we kill them 

     all. You say why kill the babies in South Africa? Because 

     they gonna grow up one day to oppress our babies, so we kill 

     the babies. Why kill the women? They, they . . . because they 

     lay on their back, they are the military or the army's 

     manufacturing center. They lay on their back and 

     reinforcements roll out from between their legs. So we kill 

     the women too. You'll kill the elders too? Kill the old ones 

     too. Goddamit, if they in a wheelchair, push 'em off a cliff 

     in Cape Town. Push 'em off a cliff in Cape Town, or 

     Johannesburg, or (inaudible), or Port Sheppston or Darbin, 

     how the hell you think they got old. They old oppressing 

     black people. I said kill the blind, kill the crippled, kill 

     the crazy. Goddamit, and when you get through killing 'em 

     all, go to the goddam graveyard and dig up the grave and kill 

     'em, goddam, again. `Cause they didn't die hard enough. They 

     didn't die hard enough. And if you've killed 'em all and you 

     don't have the strength to dig 'em up, then take your gun and 

     shoot in the goddam grave. Kill 'em again. Kill 'em again, 

     'cause they didn't die hard enough.

       We found out that the Federal Reserve ain't really owned by 

     the Federal Government . . . But it ain't owned by the 

     Federal Government. The Federal Reserve is owned by, you just 

     touched on it a little while ago. (Jews.) It's owned by the 

     Jews.

       Brother. I don't care who sits in the seat at the White 

     House. You can believe that the Jews control that seat that 

     they sit in from behind the scenes. They control the finance, 

     and not only that, they influence the policy-making.

       No white Jews ever in bondage in Egypt for 400 years. 

     You're not the chosen people of God. Stop telling that lie. 

     Let's go a little further with this. Many of you put out the 

     textbooks. Many of you control the libraries, Lie-braries. 

     NBC, ABC, CBS, you don't see nothin', or makes sure we don't 

     see, Warner Brothers, Paramount, huh? Hollywood, period.

       But [they] also are most influential in newspaper, 

     magazine, print media and electronic media.

       These people have had a secret relationship with us. They 

     have our entertainers in their hip pocket. In the palm of 

     their hand, I should say. They have our athletes in the palm 

     of their hand.

       Many of our politicians are in the palm of the white man's 

     hand, but in particular, in the palm of the Jewish white 

     man's hand.

       The Jews have told us, the so-called Jews have told us, ve 

     (sic) ve, ve suffer like you. Ve, ve, ve, ve marched with Dr. 

     Martin Luther King, Jr. Ve, ve, ve were in Selma, Alabama. 

     Ve, ve were in Montgomery, Alabama. Ve, ve were in 

     Montgomery, Alabama. Ve, ve, were on the front line of the 

     civil rights marches. Ve have always supported you. But let's 

     take a look at it. The Jews, the so-called Jews, what they 

     have actually done, brothers and sisters, is used us as 

     cannon fodder.

       Go to the Vatican in Rome, when the old, no-good Pope, you 

     know that cracker. Somebody need to raise that dress up and 

     see what's really under there.

  Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

  Mr. HYDE. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

  (Mr. HYDE asked and was given permission to revise and extend his 

remarks.)

Margaret Hodge

Margaret Oppenheimer - J'accuse!

Know Your Enemy.

CAPE TOWN. Putin With De Beers Chairman Nicholas Oppenheimer.

Diamonds aren't forever - but Children are.

Labour MP Margaret Hodge, who chairs the Public Accounts Committee, said there had been a "veil of secrecy" over the establishment for far too long.

Quite right, luv - and you're right in the middle of it (in every sense).

Appearing on the Sky News Murnaghan programme, she added: "Thank God it is coming out into the open. I think the really interesting thing about it is there has been a veil of secrecy over the establishment for far too long.

"Now the establishment who thought they were always protected...find actually they are subject to the same rigours of the law and that's right.

"What we really need to get right as well is how children are cared for today.

"Let's learn from the historic abuse, let's actually give victims the right to have their voice on that, but let's actually also focus on the present."

17. In 1985, 14-year-old Jason Swift was killed by a child-abuse gang. 

Jason is believed to have lived in Islington council's Conewood Street children's home. (Jersey child abuse link to Islington, London) 

Sidney Cooke, Leslie Bailey, Robert Oliver, and Lennie Smith, were imprisoned in 1989 for the manslaughter of Jason Swift. 

Cooke and his gang had sexually tortured and prostituted a number of boys. 

The gang is believed to have killed at least nine children.[2] 

Cooke was sentenced to 19 years in prison. 

In 1998, Cooke was let out of prison eight years early. 

There have been allegations that very powerful people have been involved in a child-abuse ring connected to Islington children's homes. ( Jersey child abuse link to Islington, London) 

In 1982 Margaret Hodge (nee Oppenheimer) became Islington council leader. 

She became a close friend of Tony Blair, who lived in Islington, a few doors away from Hodge. 

In February 1990 Liz Davies and David Cofie, senior social workers, discovered evidence of sex abuse of children and reported it to a residents' meeting attended by Mrs Hodge. 

In May 1990 Mr Cofie and Ms Davies were told by Lyn Cusack, assistant director of social services, to stop interviewing children about the abuse claims. 

On 1 May 1997 Tony Blair moved from Islington to Downing Street. 

In June 2003 Mrs Hodge was made minister for Children. (Another minister under fire: call for Hodge to quit over child ...)

The IRA are extremely political.

The personal fortune of one of Parliament’s most powerful committee chairs has taken a hammering thanks to a major corporate reorganisation within her family’s deeply troubled steel empire.

Margaret Hodge’s stake in Stemcor, the multinational founded by her father Hans Oppenheimer, was once worth millions but is now perhaps worth less than £250,000.

Meanwhile annual dividends, which in happier times furnished the famously feisty of the Public Accounts Committee chairwoman a probable income of at least £50,000, will vanish for years to come.

Vulture funds have swooped in to buy up its debt at huge discounts, as banks cut their losses and run.

The former Labour minister’s brother, Ralph Oppenheimer, 72, retired “with immediate effect” as executive chairman in September.

Stemcor was set up by Ms Hodge’s father, Hans Oppenheimer, and had been run by Ralph for decades after his father died in 1985.

It ran up debts of more than $1bn (£620m) with a host of banks through its revolving credit facilities. But the business, which suffered massive losses in its international trading division, has struggled to service the loans.

The banks agreed to a number of standstill deals on repayments throughout this year and are close to launching a major restructuring, with a host of its businesses to be sold around the world.

Because Stemcor is privately owned, it is hard to value, but accounts for last year said shareholders’ funds totalled £184mcompared with £241m the previous year. It will now be a fraction of last year’s value. Full details of the plan will emerge when it is finalised early in the New Year.

In the meantime, some bankers to the company have been selling their debt to vulture funds led by the Manhattan billionaire Leon Black’s Apollo at as little as 30 cents for $1 worth of loan.

Companies like Apollo buy up debt cheaply and demand dramatic change to the company to increase the value of the loan. Others thought to be buying into Stemcor’s “distressed debt” include Australia’s Anchorage Capital Partners and London-based Duke Street.

News of Stemcor’s troubles could arguably be good for Ms Hodge’s image, however. Because of the Oppenheimer family wealth she is among a cadre of senior Labour politicians criticised by the right for being “champagne socialists”.

British employees will also be relieved as the restructuring is unlikely to affect the UK workforce or plants.

Ms Hodge’s son from her first marriage, Nicholas Watson, is listed at Companies House as a director of the Stemcor division, Barclay & Mathieson.

A spokeswoman for Ms Hodge, who as culture minister in the last Labour government criticised “nepotism” in the arts world, declined to comment on her son’s position, or on the financial difficulties of Stemcor.

Across Stemcor’s businesses worldwide, company accounts show there were 118 injury accidents last year, 39 of which were serious. Ofthose, 25 were in the group’s Barclay & Mathieson UK stockholding business and a German site. The company said safety performance overseas was “encouraging” but the total number of lost days (over 1600) remained a “matter for concern”.

Q: Who Killed Michael Hutchance...? A: ASIO (-unconfirmed-)

THE DEATH OF A ROCK STAR

The coroner's verdict on the death of Michael Hutchence was suicide. But Paula Yates, the singer's girlfriend, claims that other forces were at work. So what really happened on the night of 21 November 1997? And why?

ROBERT MILLIKEN

 

 

Sunday 05 April 1998

WHEN MICHAEL HUTCHENCE flew into his native Australia last November, there were few signs that his dazzling career was about to crash land, that he was about to kill himself.

The lead singer of INXS was returning to Sydney, the city where he was born, for a concert tour to mark the twentieth anniversary of the band's birth. Twenty years is a long time in rock. It implies stamina, steeliness and an instinct for survival, qualities denied to many in that business. And for Hutchence, at 37, this trip had a special purpose. He was preparing for the arrival of his girlfriend, the TV personality Paula Yates, also 37, and their 16 month-old daughter, Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily. Hutchence had become exasperated by the couple's treatment at the hands of the British tabloids, and of the endless legal battles with Yates's former husband, the rock singer Bob Geldof, over her three children from that marriage. Hutchence planned to set up a base for his new family Down Under, from where he would embark on the next stage of his career as a solo singer and actor. As he approached 40, everything looked rosy. Or so he told his friends.

Underneath, though, Hutchence was a mass of insecurities. Ever since a freak accident in 1992 robbed him of most of his senses of taste and smell, he had become increasingly prone to bouts of depression. He would burst into tears for the slightest reason. In late 1995, he started taking Prozac, the controversial anti-depressant. He took it frequently from then on, sometimes with cocaine, ecstasy and other recreational drugs. Despite outward appearances, the aspect of Hutchence's life that was causing him the most inner turmoil by the time he returned to Australia in November was his relationship with Paula Yates. He felt trapped by it, friends say, in a way that he had never felt trapped before.

Hutchence flew in from Los Angeles where, accompanied by Martha Troup, his New York-based personal manger, he had spent a few days talking about possible film deals involving Michael Douglas and Quentin Tarantino. He landed in Sydney on Tuesday 18 November at 11pm, and checked into the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Double Bay, an upmarket neighbourhood in Sydney's eastern suburbs. Next day, INXS's Sydney publicist helped him to inspect an apartment for Paula and Tiger Lily's anticipated arrival before Christmas. On Thursday, he joined the other INXS members for rehearsals at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's television studios. That night, he skipped a film premiere and slept instead. There were more rehearsals on Friday, which broke up in the early evening with the band agreeing to reconvene the next morning. The Saturday rehearsal was crucial: it was the last before the start of the Australian tour. But Friday 21 November would be the last time INXS would ever play together.

After a drink at the Ritz Carlton bar, Hutchence joined his father for dinner at the nearby Flavour of India restaurant. Kelland Hutchence (known as Kell) is a successful Sydney businessman who lives up the road from Double Bay in Bellevue Hill, a neighbourhood of mansions overlooking Sydney Harbour that is home to some of Australia's richest people, including Kerry Packer, the media magnate. Kell is a friendly man with grey hair, a ruddy face and a passion for urban conservation. Over dinner that night, his one concern was his son. "I held his hand across the table," Kell said later. "I said, 'Mike, is everything OK? I know you're very happy, but you seem a little uptight.' And he said, 'No, Dad, I'm fine. Really. I've never felt better.' "

Kell Hutchence dropped his son back at the Ritz Carlton at 10.30, then drove home through the quiet, leafy streets of Bellevue Hill. For Michael Hutchence, the night was just beginning. He went straight to the hotel bar, ordered a drink and started flirting with two young women fans. At about 11 o'clock, Kym Wilson, an Australian actress, and Andrew Rayment, her boyfriend, arrived to meet Hutchence. Wilson, a former star of TV soap-operas, once had a romantic fling with Hutchence, and the couple remained friends, as Hutchence did with several old girlfriends.

He invited Wilson and Rayment to his room, saying that he wanted to stay close to his telephone in case of calls from Britain about the latest legal ruction between Yates and Geldof. The original plan had been for Paula to go to Sydney for Christmas and stay for three months. But she could do so only if she could take two of her and Geldof's daughters - Peaches, eight, and Pixie, seven - with her. Initially, Geldof had agreed. Then he changed his mind. So the couple were due in court again that Friday - or early Saturday morning, Sydney time: about now. For Hutchence, the stakes were high indeed. No Peaches and Pixie meant no Paula - and therefore no Tiger Lily, the daughter he loved more than anyone else in the world.

Kym Wilson and her boyfriend stayed in Hutchence's room for almost five hours, until dawn was breaking on Saturday. Only two people have spoken about what happened in those hours: Derek Hand, the New South Wales coroner, and Wilson, who sold her "exclusive" account for a fee reported to be around Au$100,000 (pounds 40,000) to Woman's Day, a magazine in Kerry Packer's empire. (The magazine said that Wilson "will donate her fee" to a trust fund for Tiger Lily.)

As they partied into the small hours, the threesome drank vodka, beer, champagne and daiquiris. "Michael talked about how he desperately wanted the girls to be with him, and that was what they wanted too," says Wilson. "Michael wasn't very fond of Bob Geldof. He didn't paint a good picture of him at all." As things turned out, that was putting it mildly.

By 4.30am, Rayment was falling asleep at the foot of Hutchence's bed. "Michael just looked at him," says Wilson. "He looked at me trying to keep up the conversation, and said, 'Oh, look, you two go home'." They did, and when they woke up later that day they turned on the radio to hear that Hutchence was dead.

Left alone in his room, Hutchence sank into despair. The trigger was a phone call from Yates in London about an hour later. She told him the custody case had been adjourned, so she would not be going to Australia with the children after all. Hutchence sounded "desperate", according to Yates. He rang Geldof almost straight away and begged him to let the children go to Australia. Geldof later described Hutchence as "hectoring, abusive and threatening". A woman in the room next to Hutchence at the Ritz Carlton was woken up by Hutchence shouting and swearing at Geldof down the phone.

Hutchence then rang the two women who friends say were closer to him than any other, Yates included. They were Martha Troup, his New York agent, and Michele Bennett, an old Australian girlfriend from the days before he was famous, who had remained his closest friend and confidante. She arranged Hutchence's last birthday party, in January 1997. Bennett, now a Sydney film producer, lived only a few streets away in Bellevue Hill. But, at a critical moment when Hutchence needed to reach these women, he only got their voices electronically. On Bennett's answering machine he left a message that she said later sounded "drunk". Then he rang Troup in New York and spoke to her voice-mail. "Martha," he said. "Michael here. I fucking had enough [sic]." That was at 9.40am in Sydney. Troup picked up the message a few minutes later and rang Hutchence's hotel room immediately. There was no answer.

At 9.50, Hutchence rang another of Troup's numbers. He left a message on that machine which Troup said "sounded as if he was affected by something. It was slow and deep." She was so worried when she heard it that she rang John Martin, INXS's tour manager in Sydney, who was getting ready for the Saturday rehearsal.

Meanwhile, Hutchence made his last call to Michele Bennett at 9.54. She answered this time. Hutchence cried down the phone, and she told him she would come straight away. But when Bennett knocked on his door, there was no answer. She tried unsuccessfully to ring the room. With long experience of Hutchence's wayward and unpredictable habits, Bennett assumed that he had pulled himself together and gone out, or simply gone to bed. She left him a note at reception and went home.

In fact, Hutchence had tied a belt around his neck, attached the buckle to a door handle in his room and hanged himself. The buckle broke away, and, when a maid went into the room shortly before midday, she found Hutchence's naked body kneeling on the floor facing the door. Bennett has never spoken publicly about the drama. "I'm still dealing with things in my own way," she told me.

WHEN THE death was announced later that day, Australia was shocked. Hutchence was the greatest rock star, and INXS the biggest band, the country had ever produced. Although another Australian act, the heavy-metal group AC/DC, could claim to have sold more records, INXS were far more stylish and had a much greater appeal across a mainstream music audience.

In Britain, the tabloids went ballistic. By the time he died, Hutchence was known less for his music and more for his turbulent lifestyle. He was the leather-clad, decadent rock star who was responsible for Kylie Minogue shedding her goodie-goodie Neighbours image and, as she said, "introducing me to sex". He was the man who seduced Paula Yates while she was still married to "Saint" Bob Geldof, propelling himself into a running battle with the paparazzi ever since.

With Paula in London and Michael in a hotel room on the other side of the world - where he spent his last night with an actress (albeit in the presence of her boyfriend), left pills scattered across the floor and was found dead with nothing on but a leather belt around his neck - the mix was too potent. Some London tabloids suggested that Hutchence and Kym Wilson had had sex that night. While others claimed that his death resulted from a bungled act of solitary auto-eroticism. Wilson has denied the first charge. "There were definitely no drugs in the room when I was there," she says. "And there wasn't any sex either."

The coroner has discounted the second. In the report in February of his inquest into Hutchence's death, Derek Hand said of the auto-eroticism theory: "There is no forensic or other evidence to substantiate this suggestion." He concluded that Hutchence had committed suicide, had intended to do so, and that no one else was involved.

Paula Yates refuses to accept this verdict. In Australia last week, where she presided over the christening of Tiger Lily in a Sydney church, she also gave her first extensive interview since Hutchence's death to Channel Nine, an Australian commercial television network which had flown her over from Britain first-class. She said that Hutchence regarded suicide as "the most cowardly act" and that he would never have left their baby. She suggested that the auto-erotic theory was the right one. Of Hutchence's sex life, she said: "I think he had tried everything. I hope he had. I just don't think he killed himself. He did in the end, but it was accidental. I knew him so well."

How well? When the shock of Hutchence's death died down, people started to look at it more clinically. They called it selfish, sordid, self-indulgent and wasteful. Of all the people with problems, they said, Hutchence was better-placed than most to deal with them. He was rich and famous, with loving, attendant parents, friends he could call on and the support of a band that had been his "family" since he was a teenager. Everyone had a theory: that Hutchence was the classic fading rock star afraid of growing old, that he saw no future for himself beyond INXS, whose days were numbered anyway.

But was it really that simple? Were there darker forces involved, the demons of a deeply depressed and paranoid man from a macho culture who had finally given up on trying to present a front to the world about who he really was? "Martha ... I fucking had enough." Those words say a lot, and so little as well. Enough of what?

Of all the possible causes of Hutchence's final depression, the one that the coroner highlighted was his relationship with Paula Yates and the pressures of the dispute with Geldof. The coroner concluded that the depression was also caused by a cocktail of drugs found in Hutchence's blood: alcohol, cocaine, Prozac and what Hand described only as "other prescription drugs". What were these? And how harmful were they when combined with a drug like Prozac? The coroner's report raised more questions than it answered.

There were few gloomy portents in Hutchence's childhood in Sydney, where he was born in January 1960. His family later moved to Hong Kong, where Kell ran an importing business and Michael spent eight years at a school for expatriate children. His main school interests were acting, athletics and stamp collecting. "Rather immature, but very pleasant" was the school's verdict on his report card when he left.

The Hutchences returned to Sydney when Michael was 12, but his parents' marriage did not last. They divorced in 1975. Both have remarried. His mother, Patricia, moved to Los Angeles to work as a make-up artist; and in his last years, Michael was estranged from her. Michael went to school in the pleasant, affluent suburbs of Sydney's northern beaches, where he met three brothers, Andrew, Tim and Jon Farriss. With their friends Kirk Pengilly and Garry Gary Beers, they formed a band called The Farriss Brothers. In 1977 the band was rechristened INXS, and for the next nine years they rocked around Australia's pubs and clubs and released a series of moderately successful albums.

It was during this period in the early Eighties that Michael Hutchence met three people, all outside the band, who were to be among the most constant figures in his life, and to whom he would often unburden himself: Michele Bennett, Greg Perano and Richard Lowenstein. Perano co- founded Hunters and Collectors, another big Australian act of the Eighties. Lowenstein was a noted film- maker and rock-video producer whose 1983 feature, Strikebound, so impressed Pete Townshend, of The Who, that he flew Lowenstein to Britain to make a short film, White City.

Lowenstein first met Hutchence in April 1984 after Hutchence had been impressed by Talking to a Stranger, a cutting-edge video that Lowenstein had made for Hunters and Collectors. INXS were on tour in north Queensland and Lowenstein, who was down in Melbourne, was leaving for the Cannes film festival in four days. Hutchence insisted that Lowenstein and his crew fly to the "sunshine State" beforehand to make a video of an INXS song, "Burn for You". Lowenstein relented, and still remembers his first meeting with Hutchence vividly: "I came face to face under the Queensland sun with six bronzed males and their girlfriends, wearing Hawaiian shirts and board shorts. The most effusive of these males stood up and loped over, shaking our hands with an eager puppy-dog gleam and a smile to die for. He said his name was Michael."

Lowenstein cast Hutchence as a junkie in his next feature, Dogs in Space, a 1986 cult film about a group of post-punk deadbeats in Melbourne. But life for Hutchence and INXS was about to change dramatically. With their 1987 album, Kick, the band finally hit the international big-time. Kick sold nine million copies worldwide, and gave the group their first American Number 1 hit, "Need You Tonight", for which Lowenstein also produced the video. As they toured Europe and America into the Nineties, Hutchence the new superstar also took on the identity of an international superstud.

His 10-year relationship with Bennett safely behind him, he embarked on a series of flamboyant affairs with high-profile women, including Kylie Minogue and the Danish model Helena Christensen, and a series of lesser- known beauties. Being attached never stopped him having other affairs on the side, however. Lowenstein believes Hutchence's sexual permissiveness masked an essential shyness and insecurity.

"He would flirt with everybody - women or waiters in restaurants," says Lowenstein. "He had a magnetic effect on men as well as women. The attraction to women wasn't as a conventional male stud, but as a man who had feminine qualities and feline body language without being effeminate. That was hugely attractive to women, along with the direct eye contact that he gave everyone. He wanted to seduce everyone, if not physically then metaphysically." A Sydney artist who encountered Hutchence at parties in Sydney and New York concurs: "He loved women. But he had a very fluid sexuality."

Hutchence and Paula Yates had met during the Eighties, but they only got involved after he appeared as her guest on Channel 4's Big Breakfast show in January 1995. She left Geldof and he ditched Christensen. He called her his "soul mate"; she described him as the "Taj Mahal of crotches". Up to then, Hutchence had gone into most relationships on the cavalier assumption that they would end after a few years, and his friends expected he would eventually find a way to move on from Paula as he had from Kylie and Helena. But a series of complications arose that made that option, for the first time, very problematical.

The first was the arrival of Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily in 1996. Hutchence's friends insist that parenthood with Paula was not on his agenda, any more than marriage to her was, despite her tearful claims after his death that they were planning to marry in January this year on the Pacific island of Bora Bora. Last week she repeated her claim, saying she was "certain" they would have married "around Christmas". She also dismissed suggestions that Hutchence never wanted a child with her. "We had a year of fertility treatment," she said.

But Kell Hutchence maintains that his son had no intention of marrying Yates. Lowenstein says that, if his friend ever got married to anyone, it probably would have been to his old flame, Michele Bennett, the one woman on whom he felt he could rely. "I always felt that, after everything, he'd go back and marry Michele and have a baby with her."

Once Tiger Lily did arrive, however, Hutchence was smitten. He experienced a form of unconditional love for the child that was new to him. For that reason, Hutchence grew increasingly paranoid about a parallel complication in his life centred on Yates's bitter and public custody battle with Geldof over their three children. He grew terrified that Tiger Lily would become a victim of this and possibly be taken from him.

Hutchence's fears reached a height in late 1996, when he and Yates were arrested after opium was allegedly found in their London home. They claimed it was planted to discredit them; the case was dropped. Geldof won a temporary custody order at the time over his three daughters. Hutchence and Yates claimed later they found electronic bugs in their home, which they believed were planted to get evidence against them.

Soon after this incident, Lowenstein had dinner with Hutchence at the Latin, a fashionable Melbourne restaurant. They talked of setting up their own film company. Back at Hutchence's Melbourne hotel, he grew agitated over the legal battle in Britain, flew into a rage against Geldof and punched the wall of his room. "He struck me then as one of the loneliest people I had ever come into contact with," says Lowenstein.

The stormy public relationship with Yates was not only eating away at Hutchence inside. It also highlighted a gulf that had grown between him and the other members of INXS. As they approached 40, most had settled down to stable domestic lives in Australia - two to the obscurity of cattle farms. Hutchence, by contrast, was still jetting here, there and everywhere, the perennial rock star, living between his houses in London, Hong Kong, the south of France and Australia. "INXS had peaked and didn't have the same creative energy any more," says Greg Perano. "The others were content to grow old, but Michael never really grew up."

HE MAY WELL have survived all this had it not been for a bizarre accident that had seriously, and possibly fatally, affected his mental well-being. In 1992, Hutchence was riding a bicycle home from a nightclub in Copenhagen when he got involved in an altercation with a taxi driver, fell and hit his head. The result was a fractured skull and severed nerves that left him with only about 10 per cent of his senses of taste and smell. His friends are convinced that the accident was a turning point that led to increasing bouts of depression and reliance on Prozac.

"Ever since the accident, he was on a slow decline," says Lowenstein. "I'd never seen any evidence of depression, erratic behaviour or violent temper before it. I saw all those things after it. One night in Melbourne, he broke down and sobbed in my arms. He said, 'I can't even taste my girlfriend any more.' His girlfriend then was Helena. For someone who was such a sensual being, this loss of primary senses affected his notion of place in the world and, I believe, damaged his psyche."

Hutchence grew increasingly sensitive to criticism and conflict. The tabloid dramas of his life with Paula affected him deeply. So did public put-downs such as that by Noel Gallagher of Oasis, who called him a "has- been" at the 1996 Brit awards. "He was a lost soul, to tell you the truth," says Perano.

By the time of his death, many of the conflicts of Hutchence's life were closing in. He was still estranged from his mother. He was caught in an unbearable war between Yates and Geldof. He feared losing his daughter. His own professional future was uncertain. A big question that arises is: what was the link between the drug cocktail in his body that night - Prozac combined with alcohol, cocaine and "other prescription drugs", a cocktail that the Sydney coroner said helped to cause Hutchence's "severely depressed" state - and his suicide?

Prozac is from a relatively new generation of anti-depressant drugs. In the latest annual edition of Mims, a standard medical-reference journal, the manufacturers of Prozac, Eli Lilly Australia, warn that doctors should prescribe Prozac in "the smallest quantity consistent with good patient management in order to reduce the risk of overdose". The drug "may impair judgement and thinking". People who take it, the warning says, should tell doctors if they are also taking other prescription drugs or alcohol, itself a depressant. How much of this regimen did Hutchence follow?

Richard Lowenstein is convinced that his friend's erratic use of Prozac contributed to his death. "He took it like candy. He was always travelling and there never seemed to be one doctor monitoring his doses or even asking if it was the right medication. I don't believe Michael intended to kill himself. He loved life too much. I believe his action came about in a sudden fit of anger and frustration from a chemical onslaught in his brain."

Hutchence's other close friend, Greg Perano, disagrees. Perano, a man who has suffered from depression himself and was once close to suicide, talked frequently to Hutchence about the condition they had in common. Hutchence wept to Perano, too. "You get into such a dark hole that you can only see one way out," says Perano. "And that is to stop whatever is causing it."

He says: "I believe that there were just a few minutes in which Michael wanted this to happen. A few minutes later he might not have wanted it. It may sound horrible, but I think it's what he wanted. He was at his peak. He was still charismatic. He hadn't grown fat, bald or old. People still thought of him as young."

Intentional or not, Hutchence seems finally to have succumbed to a streak of self-destructiveness that put him in a pantheon of other rock gods, for whom the pressures and prices of fame over the past 30 years proved too much to handle: Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison of the Doors and Kurt Cobain.

Hutchence's affairs in death are as tangled as they were in life. In the last few weeks, it has emerged that his estate, worth about pounds 8 million, has been hidden in a complex web of discretionary trusts and holding companies stretching through Hong Kong, Australia, the British Virgin Islands and Europe. His will gave half his estate to Tiger Lily with the other half divided equally between Paula Yates, his father, brother, sister and his mother, even though he remained estranged from her. But, when he died, Hutchence was technically bankrupt.

The web of companies controlling Hutchence's assets was reputedly designed to minimise the tax liabilities on his income. Many of the companies have as a director Colin Diamond, Hutchence's New Zealand-based financial adviser and a co-executor of his will. But the impact of the financial arrangements that Hutchence left in Diamond's hands means that the beneficiaries may face a long battle in securing assets that they believe are rightfully theirs. Hutchence owned houses in Smith Terrace, London SW3, and Antibes in the south of France. These and other properties in Australia are not listed as part of his estate. The London house, for example, is owned by a company in the British Virgin Islands.

Patricia Glassop, Hutchence's mother, is now threatening legal action against a company that is planning to sell one of her son's three properties in Queensland. "I feel like I have lost Michael twice," she told the Sydney Morning Herald last week. "His houses have been closed down. I do not even have one of his shirts to remind me of him." Diamond and his solicitor brother, Stephen, are reported to be negotiating with Kell Hutchence and Yates, but refusing to deal with Michael's mother.

Why did Hutchence leave his affairs this way? His friends believe he was concerned above all to secure Tiger Lily's inheritence from legal challenge by others, and that he understood the complexities of the way his fortune was being handled. Others are not so sure. Last week, the company that arranged Hutchence's funeral in Sydney last November was threatening to sue his estate for its bill of Au$50,000 (pounds 20,000), which is still unpaid.

The funeral angered INXS members and many of Hutchence's old friends. Acting for Hutchence's mother, Harry M Miller, a Sydney celebrity agent, negotiated the live television rights with an Australian commercial network. Nick Cave, the Australian singer, sang for his friend but refused to let his segment be televised. Paula wanted Tom Jones to sing "What's New Pussycat?", Michael's favourite song by his favourite singer, but his family refused. Jones attended and wept instead. Greg Perano later wrote a letter to Tiger Lily, which Paula is holding for the child, bemoaning the funeral's tone. "It was your father's last show," he wrote. "He was so bored his mates had to carry him out in a box."

After his cremation, Hutchence's ashes were divided between his family and Paula and Tiger Lily. Sacrilege to some, but an unavoidable outcome, it seemed, of his stormy, unreconciled life.

A few weeks later, the surviving members of INXS, together with Michele Bennett and a handful of Hutchence's old friends, joined his father and brother on a yacht in Sydney Harbour. It was 21 January 1998, the day Michael would have turned 38. They swapped stories about him; then, as a Maori singer sang "Amazing Grace", Kell and Rhett Hutchence moved to the bow of the boat. They held each other as they tipped their son and brother's ashes overboard. As the boat moved slowly away, the evening sky turned bright red and the waters of Sydney Harbour went perfectly still. Main picture: Michael is interviewed by Paula Yates on the set of Channel 4's `Big Breakfast' show, the meeting that led to an affair. This page (clockwise from above): Michael in 1985 with Michele Bennett, the long-time girlfriend who remained his closest friend and confidante; with the Danish model Helena Christensen in 1994; holding Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily, the daughter he loved more than anyone else in the world, in 1996 at the Chelsea house he shared with Paula Yates; posing with fellow members of INXS in 1996; and stepping out with Kylie Minogue in Sydney in 1990

Mourners at the funeral on 25 November included Paula Yates (top), Michael's father Kell and step-mother Sue (middle), and pall-bearers including fellow members of INXS and Michael's brother Rhett (above, in stripes)

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 Paula Yates, Michael Hutchence, and Bob Geldof

The epitome of white trash! Holy fuck!

I've been reading about this lot.

We all know that Yates and Geldof were married. She was a major drug addict, even attempted to take her life. She then shacks up with Hutchence, has a kid, and we know what happened to him -- "suicide" (??) She says later that she believes that he could have killed himself with a noose while jerking off. This is the opposite story she gave to investigators. I'm sure that the authorities and coroner would have been able to tell if this was the case. Many say that she had threatened Hutchence to marry her or she was taking his kid away. Apparently, she pulled this same stunt the day he was found dead. Some even think he was murdered because of the way he was found.

Hutchence died in 1997. Yates died of a heroin overdose in 2000, leaving behind a bunch of kids, including the one she had with Hutchence. More about Paula: she found out that the person she thought was her father, wasn't. It was some game show host.

The names of her children: Fifi Trixibelle Geldof (born 1983), Peaches Honeyblossom Geldof (born 1989), Little Pixie Geldof (born 1990), Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily Hutchence Geldof (born 1996)

Anyhoo, she dies, and Geldof runs and petitions to adopt the Hutchence kid, before any of her or Hutchence's family gets the chance to do the same. Because he files first, they all have to be OK'ed by him to also petition -- WTF?!

Yates had said that Geldof was a lunatic, screaming that he was, "above the law".

Now, we have all these scandals involving his kids, having drunken orgies, drug binges, etc.

There's a ton more, the real sleazy shit, but these are pretty much the hard facts. They are one fucked up lot.

Geldof, yeah, the asshole fame whore charity seeker, (Live Aid), is all into the father laws, you know, the ones that basically want to stick it to the mother of their kid.

So, what's your take on Yates, Hutchence, and Geldof? With Hutchence, how do you think he really died? Does Geldof get on your nerves with his fame whoring? Do you remember Yates' career as a TV presenter. She first met Hutchence doing an interview, and it can be seen on Youtube.

by: Anonymous

replies 130

03/19/2011 @ 08:37PM