A piano teacher who gave lessons to the children of several Hollywood power players was sentenced Friday to nine years and four months in prison for sexually abusing a longtime student starting when the boy was 13, prosecutors said.
The sentencing brought a close to a decade-long legal battle marked by several twists and turns — including a dramatic move by the defendant, John Kaleel, to flee to Australia the same day a jury found him guilty of five counts of sexual abuse.
Kaleel’s attempts to evade justice proved unsuccessful. He was arrested in Australia at the request of the U.S. government and extradited to Los Angeles in January.
“He has now learned the hard way that you can run, but you cannot hide,” L.A. County Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman said in a statement that month.
The 69-year-old musician taught private lessons in Los Angeles for more than a quarter century and listed numerous A-listers in the testimonial section of his now-defunct website. Among the stars whose children he taught were the creators of “Orange Is the New Black,” “Mad Men” and “Dexter’s Laboratory,” according to the website.
Kaleel was convicted of sexually abusing one of his students from 2011 to 2013. The L.A. County Sheriff’s Department began looking into the allegations in 2015, when a student reported that Kaleel had been treating him inappropriately for years.
The boy said that Kaleel asked him to measure his penis when he was 12 years old and later convinced him that they should masturbate over FaceTime, according to court records. In September 2013, when the boy was 15, Kaleel invited him over, they smoked marijuana together and engaged in oral sex, prosecutors said.
Kaleel, an Australian national, initially pleaded no contest to the sex abuse charges filed against him in 2016, hoping to receive a lesser prison sentence.
Following the plea, he was taken into custody by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He then successfully appealed a deportation order and convinced an L.A. County judge to throw out the plea deal on the grounds that he was unaware of how it would affect his immigration status.
The district attorney‘s office then decided to retry his case. In October, a jury found him guilty of four felony counts of committing a lewd act upon a child age 14 or 15 and one felony count of committing a lewd act upon a child under age 14. On Friday, he was sentenced to nine years and four months in state prison, ordered to register as a sex offender and given a 10-year protective order, prosecutors said.
“Our hearts remain with the victim who endured years of abuse by someone he trusted,” Hochman said in January. “Thank you to my office’s prosecutors, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, and our federal and Australian law enforcement partners who came together to ensure that Mr. Kaleel was brought back to Los Angeles to be sentenced for the crimes of which the jury convicted him.”
