Boy George Prison Bound

Boy George was sentenced to an immediate 15 months in prison and ordered to pay 5,000 pounds (about $9,175 Canadian) in court costs on Friday after he was earlier convicted of falsely imprisoning male escort Audun Carlsen.

The singer, who was tried under his real name of George O'Dowd, had pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Carlsen said O'Dowd had handcuffed him to a wall at the former Culture Club singer's London, England apartment and then beaten him with a chain in April 2007.

"Whilst I accept that Mr. Carlsen's physical injuries were not serious or permanent, in my view there can be no doubt that your premeditated callous and humiliating handcuffing and detention of Mr. Carlsen shocked, degraded and traumatised him," said judge David Radford in handing down the sentence. "He was deprived of his liberty and his human dignity without warning or proper explanation to him of its purpose, length or purported justification."

"This defendant is a kind and generous man who is particularly mindful of others' needs," said O'Dowd''s lawyer, Adrian Waterman, according to The Associated Press. "He is the antithesis of the haughty bullying star.

"He was not himself when addled by the habitual and relatively long-lasting using of illegal drugs."

O'Dowd, 47, had apparently been fighting cocaine addiction at the time of the incident. He says he's been clean for 10 months and has joined Narcotics Anonymous.

O'Dowd had lined up a U.K. tour for May that will now be cancelled. He probably won't be able to return to Japan or the U.S., where he had a thank-you concert scheduled in New York for the city's Department Of Sanitation.

O'Dowd was sentenced to a week's worth of community service as a sanitation worker in August 2006 after filing a false police report about a non-existent burglary at his house. Instead of a robber, police found cocaine in his apartment.

O'Dowd also had previous convictions for theft when he was a juvenile in 1977 and for a drug offence 10 years later.

Carlsen and O'Dowd met on the Gaydar gay dating website early in 2007 and later posed naked at a photo shoot where they took cocaine. O'Dowd solicited Carlsen for sex, but Carlsen said no, and O'Dowd paid him for the photo shoot. But O'Dowd then started emailing Carlsen and accused the escort of hacking into his computer.

O'Dowd, who didn't testify at the trial so as not to upset his ill mother, never denied handcuffing Carlsen to the wall. He said in a taped interview with police that he did so in order to check his computer. He maintained Carlsen's injuries were consensual and his lawyer argued that O'Dowd was too fat to beat up the escort.