A comedian has been jailed for four years and three months over a campaign of abuse against two women.
Award-winning stand-up John David McDade, who goes by the stage name JD Brown, was also ordered not to contact his victims for 20 years.
McDade, 37, of Coatbridge, sniggered and blew kisses at the public gallery as he was led into the dock at Airdrie Sheriff Court to be sentenced yesterday.
We reported last month how he had been found guilty of a string of offences against Leigh McDiarmid and Rhea Jack.
Yesterday, Sheriff Derek O’Carroll told McDade: “You pose a serious danger to any woman who is unlucky enough to be entrapped in your manipulative and controlling snares. The harm you have deliberately caused can only merit a lengthy custodial sentence.”
Scots comedian abducted woman and locked her in his home during campaign of abuse
The sheriff told McDade the length of the sentence “means you will not automatically be entitled to early release”.
The Record can reveal today that McDade was also convicted of assaulting his ex wife and two other women following a trial at Glasgow Sheriff Court in 2013.
In his latest trial, the court heard how McDade abducted Leigh, locked her in his home, refused to let her leave and forced her to stay overnight.
During one attack, he seized her by the throat and held her down, restricting her breathing.
The abuse against Leigh took place between December 2011 and January 2014.
McDade was also found guilty of a campaign of abuse against Rhea, 29.
Between April 2015 and August 2018, he threw a hot drink on her face, pinned her to the floor and struck her on her head and body to her severe injury.
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McDade was also found guilty of behaving in a threatening and abusive manner to towards Rhea between September 2014 and August 2016.
In relation to Leigh, 39, the sheriff told him: “Your dreadful behaviour caused her huge upset and stress.
“You caused her to become ill and to suffer depression, anxiety and panic attacks.
“In her victim impact statement, she described that you ruined her life.”
The sheriff said he found it “particularly despicable” that McDade had reduced Rhea to a “distressed state” and videotaped her when she was “crying on the bathroom floor”.
He branded McDade’s pattern of behaviour “worrying” and said social workers had deemed him a “high risk of assaulting intimate partners he was in a relationship with”.
Last night, Leigh wept with relief at news of McDade’s jail term.
She said: “I’m over the moon. I’m finally free of him after all this time.
“He ruined my life. People need to know who he really is.”
McDade, who won Virgin’s New Stand-up of the Year 2014, was ordered to carry out 300 hours of community service in November 2013 after his previous conviction for attacks against three women that took place between March 2005 and June 2011.
At the time, the court refused the Crown’s motion for non-harassment orders to be put in place to protect his ex-wife and the other two victims.
The court heard that between 2003 and 2011, McDade was a suspect in 14 domestic incidences involving five women.
