Game of Thrones actor, Joseph Gatt has spoken out for the first time after a judge threw out the sexual contact case brought against him by an ‘obsessed’ 16-year-old fan.
In an exclusive interview with DailyMail, he says his career as an actor has been destroyed by the allegations and he can no longer find work.
‘This has been a horrific experience for almost two years – it ruined my life,’ said the 52-year-old who played Thenn Warg on GoT.
‘My agent fired me the next day without even speaking to me,’ said British actor Gatt, who has lived in the U.S. for more than two decades.
‘I was fired from the Rebel Moon movie that I had already started work on. Offers stopped coming in. After 35 years, my career was ruined.
‘People hear an allegation and say, “Oh, he must be guilty’ There is not even any discussion. Innocent till proven guilty does not exist any more.’
Charges against Gatt were dismissed on Friday by LA Superior Court Judge M.L. Villar after it was revealed that forensic technologist Jeff Fischbach could show that the girl – ‘LT’ –had made up the story of abuse.
Armed with 180 slides of Instagram and Snapchat texts and photos, Fischbach and Gatt’s attorney Dana Cole huddled with Deputy District Attorney Michael Fern before the hearing was due to start.
Fern then asked Judge Villar to dismiss the case ‘without prejudice’ which means prosecutors could re-file the same charge against him in the future.
Gatt, who wore a dark gray pinstriped suit and open-neck white shirt in court Friday, has protested his innocence ever since his arrest in April 2022.
Attorney Cole told the judge: Mr Gatt is an actor and this case has had a devastating effect on his career, financially and emotionally.
‘This was manufactured evidence by a purported victim. Her so-called personal conversations show an extremely troubled young lady who fantasized about Mr. Gatt.
‘Who is the victim here? Is it the alleged victim or is it Mr. Gatt?’ asked Cole. ‘His career has been destroyed and it’s not right.’
Judge Villar had been due to decide whether there was a case against Gatton charges of ‘contact with a minor for sexual offense’ and possessing an assault gun.
The alleged teenage victim was not in court.
After the hearing, Gatt told DailyMail that his nightmare was sparked innocently two years ago when a relative of ‘LT’ – whom Gatt didn’t know – paid to have the actor record a video birthday greeting for her via Cameo, a company that sells personalized greetings from celebrities.
What he didn’t know at the time, he said, was that ‘this girl was already obsessed with my character on Z Nation,’ a TV show that ran from 2014 to 2018 in which he played ‘The Man’.
‘She was already sharing pictures and texts about me with her friends, completely unbeknown to me,’ Gatt said. ‘She would say in texts supposedly to me, “I want you to be my daddy”.
’She even had nude pictures of me on her phone from the TV show Banshee,’ a 2013-16 series that ran from 2013-2016.
‘And she was telling her friends and sharing fake Instagrams and Snapchat conversations with me, some of them very sexual, which she totally made up.
‘We have absolute proof that she manufactured all this stuff about me. And we’ve never heard from the supposed victim.’
A relative of ‘LT’ – concerned about the postings and photos the teenager claimed were from Gatt – contacted LA police.
In April 2022, at the LA home he shares with his girlfriend, actress and writer Mercy Malick, 51, a SWAT team turned up at 4.30 in the morning with guns, dragged us out of bed, and searched the house, he said.
‘They searched my computer and my phone but they found nothing on them. They illegally seized my AR15 gun which is licensed and completely legal.
‘The police were relying completely on this girl’s accusations about me which were all made up. But the DA won’t admit that these supposed internet conversations were all manufactured.’
While Gatt is pleased with Friday’s dismissal, he feels he has been robbed of ‘the chance to completely exonerate myself’ because of the decision to dismiss the case without prejudice.
‘I’m a little disappointed because I’m innocent and I want to be able to tell the world that and rebuild my life.
‘Yet I still have to worry that one day they could come back and arrest me again for something I never did, that was totally made up.’
’Some people will still say, “He got off but he still did it.”
‘If it had been dismissed with prejudice it would have mean the DA couldn’t re-file the charge against me and I could share with the world the 7,000 pages of documents we have that prove I’m innocent.
‘But the DA doesn’t want us to do that because they know it would be very embarrassing publicly for them and make them have to admit that they did not do a good job and should never have brought this case in the first place.
‘With the dismissal without prejudice, they get to hold it over my head, like a threat that they could bring the case again so I shouldn’t share all this material I have that shows the evidence against me was manufactured. The DA is trying to prevent us from releasing it.’
Cole said, ‘If you are a celebrity in LA, all you have to do is use the internet and evidence against you can be manufactured.
‘It’s easy to create fake conversations and pictures and it puts celebrities at a real risk of having their careers destroyed.’
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