A woman has claimed she may have become pregnant by DJ John Peel during a three-month affair when she was a 15-year-old schoolgirl.
The BBC star presenter met Jane Nevin backstage at a Black Sabbath concert in the summer of 1969. She was hoping to meet the band, including Ozzy Osbourne, but instead caught the eye of Peel.
She said: ‘He came over and started talking to me. I was totally in awe of John. I adored his long hair and beard and he talked so intensely about music.After that night, we would meet up about once a week. If we had sex, we never went to his place'.
Mrs Nevin says she was ‘in awe’ of the Radio 1 DJ, then 30, and that they would go to his London BBC studio or backstage at concerts to make love.
She remembers: ‘It would always be in his studio or backstage at the Roundhouse in Camden. I loved the status of knocking around with him. He would invite me to gigs and I would follow him around like a lapdog. I don’t know if sex was expected but I went along with it willingly. Looking back, it was terribly wrong and I was perhaps manipulated. But it was a different era.’
Peel had unprotected sex with the teenager shortly after boasting on-air that he had been suffering from a venereal disease.
She said: ‘He [Peel] must have known I was still at school. But he didn’t ask and I didn’t tell him. At the time I was just so happy to be on his arm. I was young and he was famous. All I cared about was that I could make all my school friends jealous. I was insecure and impressionable. I suppose I used him for his fame and he used me for sex.’
She admits it was a difficult period in her life. ‘I was badly bullied at school for being posh. I went to private school in South London until I was 11, but when my father died, my mother couldn’t afford to keep me there so I went to the local comprehensive in Wandsworth. I did horse riding and dance classes at Italia Conti. I didn’t fit in. As a result, I was desperate to be loved.’
They split up when her mother, an antiques restorer, found out about the relationship. 'One night he called the house and my mother gave him hell,’ said Mrs Nevin. ‘She knew he had spoken about having VD because it had been in the papers. That put an end to us seeing each other.’
But Jane Nevin discovered she was pregnant shortly after, aged 16, and had a ‘traumatic’ abortion at a clinic in Ealing.
‘I was devastated when I found out I was pregnant,’ she said. ‘I didn’t even think about telling John. I just wanted it to be over.’
When Mrs Nevin wrote to Peel out of the blue 30 years later mentioning their ‘brief affair’, he replied expressing his relief that she was not writing to confess she had his secret child.
On a postcard sealed in an envelope, Peel, who died in 2004, wrote: ‘Well, you’ve scared the daylights out of me. For years I’ve been expecting a letter starting, “In the 70s we had a brief affair – and your now son/daughter, aged 27, wants to meet you”.’
Mrs Nevin, 59, who lives in Capel, Surrey, decided to break her silence after allegations emerged that fellow BBC DJs abused dozens of teenage girls during this period.