Dizzee Rascal sentenced to community order for assaulting ex-fiancée

Rapper Dizzee Rascal has been ordered to wear an electronic tag and banned from contacting his former fiancée after attacking her in a heated row over childcare.

The 37-year-old star – real name Dylan Mills - pressed his head into the forehead of Cassandra Jones and eventually barged her to the floor after he turned up angry at her mother’s home.

He was branded “evasive and belligerent” by District Judge Polly Gledhill last month as she found him guilty of assault, and she sentenced Mills on Friday morning to a community order including a 24-week electronically tagged curfew.

Mills is banned from contacting Ms Jones under a year-long restraining order.

The judge told Mills to work on how he thinks and behaves as he “lost his temper and used violence”, adding that he still has shown “no remorse for this matter”.

“You continue to place the blame on Ms Jones – the victim in this case”, she said.

The musician, behind chart-topping singles Bonkers and Dance Wiv Me, damaged a photographer’s camera outside court in a tantrum when he was convicted but escaped police action.

He had attacked Ms Jones on June 8 last year, a few months after the breakdown of their relationship, when she complained that he had returned late from a day out with his daughter.

Mills sent aggressive texts to his former fiancée, telling her to “shut up”, before barging his way into Ms Jones’s mother’s house in Streatham for a confrontation.

“On returning home with his child late, he lost his temper,” said the judge.

She said Mills started shouting at the mother, Dawn Kirk, and “when Ms Jones took action to try and prevent this, he took her phone to prevent police being called.

“He assaulted her by pushing her around the lounge by his forehead and by barging past when she tried to retrieve her phone, putting her to the ground.”

Mills shot to fame after the release of his debut album, Boy In Da Corner, in 2003, and was made an MBE for services to music in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2020.

He performed at festivals in August including Live At Lydiard in Swindon and Boardmasters in Cornwall, and has a new studio album due for release in October.

The rapper denied having any physical contact with Ms Jones during his trial, insisting she was the “aggressor” and had left a mark on his left arm.

The court heard how Mills and Ms Jones had been in an on-off relationship for nine years and share two children.

Ms Jones called her former partner “out of control” in the incident then culminated in the assault, saying: “He put his forehead on my forehead and he pushed me around the room.”

In a statement after the guilty verdict, she said it “has brought me no joy, but it does help me to look back on what I experienced and have it recognised by the courts as assault”.

Hailing the support she has received as a victim of domestic abuse, she said: “This verdict shows that wealth and status cannot be used to silence women. One in four women in England and Wales will experience domestic abuse at some point in their lifetime. I now ask for privacy to rebuild and reset.

“I hope I can now move on with my life.”

The Met Police initially indicated it would investigate an incident during which Mills was filmed outside Wimbledon magistrates court – moments after being found guilty – throwing a PA news agency photographer’s camera equipment across the road. However the probe was halted when the photographer indicated he would seek civil compensation and did not support a prosecution.

Mills, of Sevenoaks in Kent, denied but was convicted of assault by beating.