Jamie/Abigail Waller
Jamie/Abigail Waller (aka Abi/Jake Smith), a violent male who identifies as a transgender woman, was convicted in November 2023 at Portsmouth Crown Court of four breaches of a Sexual Harm Prevention Order (SHPO) imposed in 2020. Waller has a long history of sexual offending against children dating back to 2018.
The circumstances of the latest offences are that Waller, 29, had been using his wife’s spare phone to groom two 14-year-old girls and a 13-year-old girl. The SHPO prevented Waller from having any contact with children under the age of 18 and from using a device connected to the internet, unless police were informed. The messages were sent from a fake Facebook profile of a young man under the name Jake Smith and were described as a “pre-cursor” or grooming offences for Waller to repeat previous sex offending against children.
Waller – wearing a pink floral dress at trial – attempted to blame his wife saying she was attempting to frame him as she wanted a divorce. The jury was not convinced and convicted him. Waller’s defence barrister also tried to convince the judge that Waller should not face a custodial sentence due to difficulties he may encounter in prison related to his ADHD and autism and because of “her [sic] gender identity matter which she is awaiting treatment for.” The judge jailed Waller for three and a half years.
Waller, from Gosport, was previously jailed at Portsmouth Crown Court for five years in 2020 after the ‘determined and manipulative paedophile’ admitted multiple serious child sex offences. The offences included blackmailing a 13 year old girl into sending nude images of herself, then sharing them with other sex offenders and together threatening to make the images go “worldwide” if she did not send more. Waller made the child call him ‘sir’ or ‘daddy’ and was caught after one of the other child profiles he targeted on Facebook turned out to be an online paedophile hunter. Examination of mobile phones seized from Waller, then aged 25, also led to the discovery of hundreds of images depicting child sexual abuse, including dozens of Category A, the most serious category. They included footage of a child aged between four and six being raped.
The Daily Mail provides a timeline of Waller’s offending since 2018 when first arrested for possession of child sexual abuse images. No action was taken and Waller was then given a suspended sentence in 2019 after being caught by online paedophile hunters. Later in the year, a police investigation revealed the serious offending that Waller was jailed for 5 years for in 2020; while in HMP The Verne in 2021, Waller began identifying as transgender. Shortly after release in 2022 (i.e. half-way through the 5 year sentence) Waller was again jailed for six months at Portsmouth Magistrates Court in August 2022 after admitting one breach of the SHPO by failing to notify police of the alias Jake Smith and then jailed for three and a half years in November for 2023 for the grooming offences.
Given Waller’s previous convictions as Jamie Waller, all media reports made clear it was a male offender who now identified as ‘Abi’ that committed the latest offences and described Waller as a ‘transgender paedophile’ though, confusingly, used female pronouns. Comments from readers on news articles registered their distrust and contempt for the editors for using female pronouns for Waller.
Image credit: Daily Telegraph via Hampshire Police/Solent News. Both images of Waller as Jamie and ‘Abi’ were released by the police
Media reports
Daily Telegraph https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/24/transgender-paedophile-blames-wife-messaging-young-girls/ archive
Daily Mail https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13000465/paedophile-jailed-messaging-teenage-girls-prosecuted-woman-self-identifies-female.html archive
Portsmouth News https://www.portsmouth.co.uk/news/crime/paedophile-gosport-jail-4491256 archive
Southern Daily Echo https://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/24072536.gosport-transgender-woman-back-prison-messaging-girls/ archive
Reduxx https://reduxx.info/uk-transgender-child-sex-offender-sentenced-to-3-5-years-after-breaching-court-order-following-release-from-prison/ archive
Hampshire Live https://www.hampshirelive.news/news/hampshire-news/depraved-paedophile-bullied-schoolgirl-online-4289818 archive