Henry Hendron admits he turned to drugs to escape the pressure of his legal career
A junior barrister who has been suspended from practice after supplying the drugs that killed his teenage boyfriend has spoken about his tragic fall from grace.
Henry Hendron was a rookie barrister who gained a name for himself for unconventionally advertising his services on bus stops and newspaper classified sections.
But everything changed in January 2015 when his 18-year-old boyfriend died after the pair spent an evening taking ‘chemsex’ drugs at Hendron’s flat in the Temple area in the heart of legal London.
Hendron, now 36, subsequently admitted possession of Class B drug methedrone and Class C drug Gamma-butyrolactone with intent to supply. He was spared jail and handed a community order, with 18 months’ supervision and 140 hours’ unpaid work.
In April this year, the Bar Standards Board opted not to strike Hendron off, instead suspending him from practising for three years.
Since then Hendron has been quiet, other than a tweet last month in which he suggested he was set to launch something called ‘legally equal’.
4 3 yrs I've bn a main player in the destructive vice world of the gay scene, today I leave all that behind, in Sept I launch legally equal
— Henry Hendron (@henryhendron) August 12, 2017
Yesterday he went public in an interview with Gay Star News which also features on YouTube (below).
In it, Hendron reveals he turned to drugs “to help escape the pressure of his demanding legal career”. He then documents in detail how he woke up to find partner Miguel Jimenez not breathing in bed alongside him having passed away during the night.
After his arrest, with his diary empty of work, Hendron recalls he went on “the biggest drugs binge I’ve ever been on” and “ended up in hospital several times and almost died on two occasions”.
Hendron continues:
I lost my career, or I was at the point of losing it, I lost the person that I really loved in my life, I lost several hundred of thousands of pounds of money because of this, and I lost the opportunity to do better things. For what? For some artificial high?
For all the latest commercial awareness info, and advance notification of Legal Cheek’s careers events, sign up to the Legal Cheek Hub.