George looking at jail time

And so Boy George's story takes another step towards the tragic: He's been found guilty of false imprisonment over that male escort he handcuffed and tried to keep in his house.

[Talking to police, George said]: "If I was going to beat [Auden Carlsen] up, I would have got my friend to beat him up with me, if I was going to do anything that vile."

It turned out that the Metropolitan Police didn't quite feel convinced by 'I would have got someone else to beat him' line of defence.

It sounds like George should have actually thought about asking the friend to see to fixing the handcuffs properly, given that when George did it, his victim was able to free himself and prance off down the street.

George's explanation in court for the imprisonment was that he had reason to believe Carlsen had been hacking into his computer which somehow gave him the right to manacle a man in his bedroom didn't, surprisingly, hold up to much in the way of cold, hard, legal light:

During the trial his defence barrister, Adrian Waterman QC, told the jury in his closing statement that the argument was whether Carlsen had stolen photographs and "in doing that, messed up George O'Dowd's computer".

He added that the suggestion that the singer had concocted the story about computer tampering because Carlsen refused to have sex with O'Dowd during their first meeting was "entire fantasy or a lie".

It's not entirely clear whether George was supposing the mercy of the court would be unleashed at the suggestion of stolen pictures, or at the idea of having to rebuild his desktop and re-install XP. Whichever it was, it didn't work, and the judge has warned George that he's seriously considering a custodial sentence.