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Thomas Dougal " Tam" Paton (5 August 1938 – 8 April 2009) was a convicted child sex offender and pop group manager, most notably of the Scottish boy band the Bay City Rollers.
In 1979, Paton was fired as manager, and subsequently developed a multi-million-pound sterling real estate business based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
In the late 1970s Paton managed the band Rosetta Stone, and had a romantic relationship with the guitarist Paul Lerwill, who later changed his name to Gregory Gray.
In his autobiography I Ran With The Gang: My Life In And Out Of The Bay City Rollers (2018), Alan Longmuir suggests Paton benefited from friendships with politicians, police officers and senior members of the justiciary, and wrote of his fears that more will emerge about Paton that will show “his depravity ran deeper than we currently know”.
Longmuir states:
He was arrested on child sexual abuse charges in January 2003, but was later cleared of all allegations. In April 2004, Paton was convicted of supplying cannabis and fined £200,000. In 2003, he was accused of trying to rape the Bay City Rollers guitarist Pat McGlynn, in a hotel room in 1977. The police decided there was insufficient evidence for a prosecution.
In 2016, Bay City Rollers singer Les McKeown accused Paton of raping him. In the documentary Secrets of the Bay City Rollers (2023):
In 2023, Gert Magnus, who had lived at a children's home, claimed that Paton blackmailed him into taking other youngsters to his house so he could sexually abuse them. In the 1970s Magnus had lived at Paton's Little Kellerstain home near Edinburgh, and had been told by Paton that, if he procured other boys for him from care homes, he would stop raping him. While at Paton's house, he said, "There were always parties and lots of young boys and lots of producers... Going to the room and coming out. Big party." He also recalled Jimmy Savile being present. "I was so young. And I thought that's normal in this business," he said. The band's original singer Nobby Clarke elsewhere said that Paton once told him the band would get better promotion on BBC Radio 1 if a member slept with DJ Chris Denning, who was later convicted of paedophilia.
In October 2022 John Wilson was convicted of sexually assaulting children, with Paton, at Paton's home.
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