Paul Brown’s descent into sexual addiction had already taken him to the outer edges of compulsion. For years, he’d run sex parties across London, many steeped in fantasies of ritual and domination. “I had lots of submissive women offering to do anything for me,” he says.
None, however, were like the woman he met in 2018.
“She was a grandmother,” he explains. “I made it known to her that I wanted to ‘own’ or dominate a family. I was so drunk on this power structure, on being a dominant master with submissives, that I lost my bearings completely.”
He pauses. “And that led to her sexually grooming her four-year-old granddaughter for me.”
Brown — not his real name — is 63 and a free man, having served five years of a nine-year sentence for the attempted grooming of a child. He is articulate and candid. He talks about his past with a kind of intellectual detachment, offering up a disturbingly fluent account of how overpowering sexual urges propelled him through a life of boundary-breaking encounters.
What has changed, he says, is not just time, but his body. Brown is undergoing what’s known, colloquially, as “chemical castration”: a regime of medication that suppresses testosterone and drastically reduces libido. For the first time, he can hear himself think, with the rollercoaster pursuit of copulation and gratification quelled to the point of control.
To read the rest of this article, become a member for free.