A piano teacher who lived and worked in West Hollywood for more than two decades — and whose clients included the children of several prominent Hollywood figures — has been sentenced to nine years and four months in state prison for sexually abusing a teenage student over a period of years.
(Facebook/John Kaleel)
John Michael Kaleel, 69, was sentenced last Friday, February 27th, following one of the more complicated criminal cases in recent LA County memory.
A jury convicted Kaleel last October on five felony counts of lewd acts upon a child, but Kaleel wasn’t in the courtroom to hear the verdict. He had fled the country. Kaleel boarded a flight to Australia the same day jurors reached their decision, apparently betting that an ocean between himself and justice in LA might buy him something. It didn’t.
Australian authorities arrested Kaleel at the request of the U.S. government. He was extradited to Los Angeles on January 8 with help from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of International Affairs, the Australian Attorney-General’s Department, the Australian Federal Police, and U.S. Marshals, who escorted him back. He’d been held at Men’s Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles since his arrival at LAX, where LA County Sheriff’s deputies were waiting.
The abuse began in 2011, when Kaleel’s victim was 13 years old and had been taking piano lessons from him for years. The crimes continued through 2013. Detectives with the LA County Sheriff’s Special Victims Bureau opened their investigation in 2015 after the victim came forward. The case wound through the courts for a decade, complicated by an early no-contest plea that Kaleel later had thrown out — he’d argued successfully that he hadn’t understood how the deal would affect his immigration status as an Australian national, prompting the district attorney’s office to try the case from scratch.
The jury that convicted him last fall heard what prosecutors described as a sustained pattern of sexual abuse by someone the victim trusted completely. Kaleel had been teaching private lessons in Los Angeles for more than 25 years and had built a client list that included families connected to the creators of “Orange Is the New Black,” “Mad Men,” and “Dexter’s Laboratory,” according to his now-defunct website.
Along with the prison sentence, the court ordered Kaleel to register as a sex offender for life and issued a 10-year protective order.
DA Nathan Hochman had made clear in January, when Kaleel was extradited, that his office wasn’t done. “He has now learned the hard way that you can run, but you cannot hide,” Hochman said at the time — a line his office repeated Friday after sentencing.
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West Hollywood Sheriff’s Station Special Victims Unit
