Former council leader jailed for sexually assaulting young men

A former SNP council leader has been jailed for 18 months for sexually assaulting five young men.

Jordan Linden, who stood down as leader of North Lanarkshire Council in 2022 after the allegations emerged, was convicted in March following a seven-day trial.

The 30-year-old was also found guilty of directing unwanted sexual communications towards seven teenagers, the youngest aged 14.

Passing sentence at Falkirk Sheriff Court, Sheriff Christopher Shead also placed Linden on the sex offenders register.

The trial heard that the sexual communications included photos of Linden in a bath and shots of his genitalia.

The offences took place over a 10-year period from 2011 until 2021.

Linden was found not guilty of a sixth charge of sexual assault and was also acquitted of five other charges of stalking and sexual communication.

Linden, who also chaired the Scottish Youth Parliament (SYP), had denied all the charges against him, claiming they either did not take place or were consensual.

Linden became a councillor for the SNP in 2017 and rose to become North Lanarkshire council leader in 2022.

He resigned from the post a few weeks later following the allegations and was arrested in 2024.

The court heard from an SNP party official who said Linden had locked him in a bathroom and tried to get him to urinate while he watched.

The man, who was 18 at the time, said the incident took place after a Dundee Pride parade when Linden was very drunk and being "very handsy" with people.

"He kept sitting on me, putting his hands near my crotch, putting his hands down my top," he told the court.

One man, who joined the SYP at the same time as Linden as a teenager, said Linden's touching, on the face or the cheek or the neck, was "relentless".

But when he told a youth worker at the parliament it was dismissed as "just Jordan".

Another man recalled a "traumatic evening" in 2018 at Linden's flat in Bellshill drinking and said he "vomited in disgust" after waking up to find Linden performing a sex act on him.

BBC Scotland News has spoken to one witness whose evidence was heard at Linden's trial but was not one of the charges against him.

The man, who we are calling James, said he was a teenager when he first met Linden in 2015 while campaigning for the SNP.

He said Linden had been "very overly friendly" from the start and that he had been warned to keep his distance by other people within the party.

During the trial James said Linden climbed into his bed during an overseas trip with the SNP's youth wing Young Scots for Independence and started trying to kiss him.

"I sort of shrugged it off and tried to ignore it the next day," he told BBC Scotland.