As someone who sat in a criminal court and observed some of the tail ends of the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) trials in the UK back in the 1980’s, it was plain to me that this group and its members were not, in the same category of other sexual abusers whose trials I witnessed. Unlike the vast majority of those who faced trial for rape, sexual assault or buggery, which was the catch all charge at the time for men engaged in paedophilic activity, the PIE-men were not the opportunistic abusers who made up the bulk of those accused or convicted of paedophilic activity.

The crimes of the PIE-men were not committed by those for whom abuse had been normalised due to they themselves also being victims of abuse, nor were they opportunistic. Also, neither did the PIE-men show any contrition or accept any genuine guilt at what they had done. The PIE-men were different. Their crimes were the result of a cold hard decision on their part. They chose the path of paedophilia. They had no shame or guilt about what they’d done and could not see and probably didn’t care about the damage both physical and psychological that their crimes did to their victims.

Out of all the nonces and rapists I observed the PIE-men were the worst. There was no hope whatsoever of redemption or reform possible for them, because deep in their twisted hearts, they saw what they were doing and what they were campaigning for, the abolition of all ages of consent for sexual activity, as a social good.

From observing the PIE-men, who achieved in the heady and sexually experimental days of the 1970’s, a now astonishing degree of acceptance by the Middle Class left in the form of the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL), I saw offenders who were the worst of the worst. Not only were they child abusers and campaigners to legalise child abuse who saw no wrong in what they wanted, but they were also cynical exploiters of anybody whom PIE thought would assist them, either because they believed in their aims, or most often, because they could persuade the naive to allow themselves to attach themselves to their cause. The stain of once supporting PIE is still visible on the NCCL, now called Liberty, and it is something that is often brought up when Liberty is discussed. PIE disbanded in the mid 1980’s but their baleful activities are still very much in the public mind.

I saw them slither their way into otherwise respectable campaigns for LGB rights and into campaigning organisations, parasitise upon them and sometimes do these campaigns great damage. Those organisations that mistakenly let PIE activists in whether the PIE activists were open about their beliefs or whether they hid their true nature, took a reputational hit. I sometimes wonder whether it was not just the social panic over AIDS in the early 1980’s that put the prospects of gay equality back by years? I believe that it was because PIE activists who hid themselves and parasitised off of respectable gay organisations, helped to prolong in the public’s mind the myth that behind every gay man is a predatory nonce.

As time has gone on the PIE-men are now either imprisoned for lengthy terms or dead or their identities are now so well known that it would be all but impossible for them to worm their way into respectable organisations as they did before. Now not even the Labour Party, a party that is currently a nest of lunatics, want anything to do with ex-PIE members now.

The lengthy introduction above concerning the background to PIE is necessary to put into context a recent story about a death from covid. This death was of a notorious PIE-man, the leader of the group and sexual abuser Steven Freeman, once known as Steven Smith. He died of covid whilst serving an indeterminate sentence for creating drawings showing children being raped. Freeman used to, in the 1970’s and early 1980’s work at the Home Office as a security alarm specialist and had his own office at Home Office headquarters where he stored some of PIE’s less sensitive files in a locked cabinet as it was unlikely that the police would raid a Home Office building. Remarkably he was security vetted every year but the incompetent police found no link between Freeman and PIE. It was only when an anti-PIE campaigner infiltrated the group that Freeman’s link to the Home Office was discovered and Freeman was sacked and had his security clearance withdrawn.

It took years to bust and destroy PIE. Sometimes this was down to police incompetence but also because there were less laws at the time, in the 70’s and early 80’s, that could be applied to paedophiles in order to control them.

But now the monster Freeman is dead and good riddance. It appears that the cloud of covid does indeed have a silver lining.

With Freeman dead, PIE slips further and further into history but we should not forget how they managed to worm their way into otherwise respectable organisations and entities. This is because entryism is a successful political tactic, not just for paedophiles but for others with an axe to grind who wish to parasitise on groups with a high public profile. We saw it with Militant Tendency in the Labour Party of the 1980’s and we see it today with PIE’s heirs, those who call themselves ‘Minor Attracted Persons’ or MAPS, who have climbed onto the woke bandwagon and are trying to infiltrate themselves into the various LGBT groups. Those who run such LGBT or civil liberties groups need to be aware of what PIE did and how they used and abused other groups in order to advance their cause to stop today’s ‘mini-PIES’ such as those calling themselves MAPS from infiltrating them, lest these groups end up suffering the same reputational damage as gay groups and civil liberties groups suffered because of their sometimes unwitting association with PIE in the past.

PIE may be dead as a group, its members dead, imprisoned or quite rightly socially ostracised, but that doesn’t mean that there will not be another PIE or similar group in the future. We as a society need to learn how PIE operated and the type of political groups that they targeted in order to prevent a group analogous to PIE organising again.