Media identity claims Alan Jones tried to touch his genitals and kiss him, but defends broadcaster

Prominent broadcaster and podcaster Josh Szeps has defended radio star Alan Jones despite revealing that the 83-year-old made repeated physical advances towards him as a young producer on his radio show, including trying to kiss him and touch his genitals.

In an episode of his Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps podcast, Szeps told listeners that Jones – who on Monday was arrested and charged with 26 offences against nine alleged victims after a top-secret police investigation – tried to “put his hand on my dick”, kiss him and rub his chest on several occasions while he worked as a junior producer on his radio show.

Josh Szeps made the allegations during an episode of his podcast. Credit: Wolter Peeters

“It was clear that he had a crush on me, and he hit on me many times, and in that context, hitting on me meant making a physical move, not a verbal one. He tried to put his hand on my dick, he tried to kiss me, he tried to rub my chest, and I would just slap him off, and we would laugh, and we’d move on,” Szeps said.

Szeps is the first person since Jones’ arrest on Monday to publicly reveal an alleged encounter with the veteran radio star. However, Szeps – who is openly gay – said he did not consider himself a victim of sexual assault and understood Jones’ “inappropriate” advances as a way of flirting, calling the broadcaster “generous and passionate and kind”.

“He is a fiery, poetic, operatic whirlwind of a man, so in a weird way it just seemed to me kind of less strange that he would try to affirm our bond with a clumsy, physical pass than by doing what? Inviting me to tea with the prime minister? Taking me to an opening night and being sneered at by the cultural elite? Inviting me as his date to a luncheon with a bunch of homophobic old business titans? No. Every time he was rebuffed, which was every time because I had no interest in that, he backed off and usually laughed it off,” Szeps said.

“It wasn’t for me anything sinister, it wasn’t for me anything threatening. It was playful, it was excessively romantic.”

Jones’ lawyers have been contacted for comment about Szeps’ claims.

Throughout the podcast episode, Szeps repeatedly defended Jones, declaring him innocent until proven guilty and questioning the severity of Jones’ alleged offending compared with disgraced British entertainer Jimmy Savile and Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.

“Unless the police have something that has never before been reported on and has never been found in the years of investigative journalism that was done into Alan Jones, none of the allegations back then had to do with him raping somebody, him forcing himself on somebody even after they said no, him locking a door and then having his way with somebody to my knowledge … to my knowledge, there’s none of that,” Szeps claimed.

Jones has been charged with 11 counts of aggravated indecent assault, 11 counts of assault with an act of indecency, two counts of sexually touching another person without their consent, and two counts of common assault.

Alan Jones leaves Day Street police station on Monday after being arrested and charged.Credit: James Brickwood

Police said Jones knew some of his alleged victims personally, some professionally, and in some circumstances the alleged abuse took place the first time they met Jones. The youngest of the alleged victims was aged 17 at the time of the alleged offences. Jones’ lawyers said on Monday their client would fight the charges laid by Strike Force Bonnefin officers.

Szeps also used his podcast episode to suggest that Jones’ upbringing in conservative rural Queensland may have contributed to his views of relationships, while reiterating the allegations against Jones were not yet proven.

“We ought to temper our righteous fury against the [alleged] perpetrators of crimes, with a recognition that they are in part products of their environment,” Szeps said. “One of the reasons why they behave [the way] they do is because they come from a particular place in a particular time.”

Szeps said Jones had promoted him to a senior producer position “implausibly fast” and that he “played the cards” he was dealt during his working relationship with Jones.

“The casting couch is a casting couch for a reason,” he said. “If you have looks and youth on your side, then you play those cards. If you don’t have youth on your side, but you do have status and influence and money, you play those cards.”

Szeps did not name the station he was working for when the alleged incidents occurred. Jones defected from 2UE to 2GB in 2001.

But he did recall one conversation during his first day in the role: “On my first day, actually, one of his most senior producers looked at me and said ‘oh he’s going to like you’, and he did.”

Szeps lashed the “morally self-righteous” treatment of the “Alan Joneses of the world”, who he said had been demonised for centuries and “persecuted with the full force of the law” when they “express their love or their affection or their, just wanting to get their rocks off, when they express urges in ways that don’t conform to the polite society that they spent their whole life being excluded from”.

“And now we have the balls to pontificate about what an evil man he is for allegedly not expressing his sexuality respectfully and conventionally according to the proper norms according to the club that we spent his entire life excluding him from,” Szeps said.

But Szeps added that if the allegations against Jones were proven, the offending would have been “wrong and illegal”.

Szeps also criticised the historic treatment of gay men by NSW Police and labelled media coverage of the allegations against Jones and his arrest as “salacious”.

Men’s rights activist Bettina Arndt used the comments section of the podcast episode to describe Szeps’ commentary as “nuanced and intelligent”.

In her own blog post following Jones’ arrest, Arndt said she was “incensed at the gleeful targeting by the state and the media of this decent, principled man”.

“Do taxpayers really approve of the spending of hundreds of thousands from our police budget trying to prove some decades-old claims of gropes of bottoms or other bits of husky young men by this 83-year-old man?” she wrote.

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