The piano teacher of the stars who fled the country last month A student was arrested in Australia shortly before a jury found him guilty of sexual assault, authorities said.
John Kalil, 69, was taken into custody by Australian Federal Police on Oct. 31, according to Nicole Nishida, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, the agency investigating his activities in the United States.
It is unclear where Kalil was arrested and Australian authorities did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Kalil, an Australian citizen, was facing a retrial on multiple counts of sexually assaulting a student last month after he fled the country on Oct. 8, according to the sheriff's department.
Kalil disappeared while the jury was deliberating at the airport courthouse. His lawyer, Kate Hardy, said she last saw Kalil after she drove him home from court on Oct. 7. She declined to comment on his arrest.
Kalil is expected to be returned to the United States, where he faces a long prison sentence after being found guilty of multiple counts of indecent acts with a child.
Kalil has been teaching private piano lessons in the United States for over 25 years, and his clients have included the children of the creators of beloved television series such as Mad Men and Orange Is the New Black. But he became the subject of a Sheriff's Department investigation in 2015 when a student told detectives that Kalil had behaved inappropriately toward him for years.
The boy said that he was 12 years old when Kalil asked to “take his measurements.” [the victim’s] body parts, including his penis,” according to court records. Kalil later convinced the boy that they should masturbate together while talking on FaceTime because “that's what friends do,” the recordings show.
Prosecutors allege that when the victim was 15, Kalil invited him over in September 2013 and they smoked marijuana together before performing oral sex.
Kalil initially pleaded no contest to one count of lewd acts with a child in 2016, but later appealed the deal on the grounds that he did not know how it would affect his immigration status. Kalil had been a lawful permanent resident of the United States since the 1980s but ended up in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody after entering a guilty plea, Hardy said.
Kalil successfully appealed the deportation order and convinced a Los Angeles County judge to reject the plea deal, but the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office decided to retry his case.
“Mr. Kalil has always maintained his innocence and that he entered into his initial plea deal on the advice of an attorney to avoid a harsher sentence if he were to lose at trial,” Hardy previously told The Times.
The District Attorney's Office did not respond to a request for comment or discuss what efforts, if any, were made to bring Kalil back to the U.S. after his arrest.
Court records show prosecutors filed for an extradition warrant last month.
