British media watchdog officials have dismissed a complaint filed by convicted sex offender Gary Glitter after he objected to the broadcast of a fictional hanging on a TV show.
The Execution of Gary Glitter aired in the U.K. in November 2009 and was billed as a "courtroom drama shot in the style of a documentary".
The 90-minute film depicted the paedophile rocker becoming the first person to be tried under a new Capital Crimes Against Children law in an imaginary Britain, where the death penalty had been re-introduced.
Glitter, real name Paul Gadd, was jailed in the U.K. in 1999 and listed as a sex offender following conviction for downloading thousands of items of child pornography. He also spent three years behind bars in Vietnam after he was found guilty of sexually assaulting two young girls. He was released in 2008 and subsequently returned to his native U.K.
The shamed star filed a formal complaint with watchdog group Ofcom after the TV movie aired, claiming viewers of the programme could be led to assume that he had committed "terrible crimes", for which he was not punished.
But officials at Ofcom ruled that Glitter had a "well-publicised reputation in relation to child sex offences", so there was "likely to be little scope for additional damage to his reputation".
The report continued: "Because the programme as a whole was clearly fictional, and the parts of the programme concerning the charge of child rape were clearly in a fictional context the Committee found that viewers would not have reached the conclusion that Mr Gadd was guilty of more serious crimes which had gone unpunished as a result of any assertions made in this drama programme."