O'Dowd was found guilty last month of attacking the Norwegian model Audun Carlsen, 29, after he visited the singer's flat in London in April 2007. During O'Dowd's trial last month, the jury was told that he had invited Carlsen into his bedroom after a naked photo session, during which they took cocaine.
He then ambushed him together with the help of an unnamed man. Carlsen said the atmosphere changed when O'Dowd returned to the flat after ostensibly popping out to buy milk and cigarettes. The altercation apparently stemmed from O'Dowd's belief that Carlsen had attempted to hack into his computer.
O'Dowd told him: "Now you're going to get what you deserve." Carlsen said he was then beaten and handcuffed to a wall fixture. When O'Dowd returned to the room with a box of leather straps, chains and sex toys, he said: "Now you're going to get it."
Carlsen told the jury he only escaped after wrenching the fixture free, but was beaten with a chain by the singer as he fled into the street in Shoreditch, east London. In an apparently accidental allusion to Culture Club's 1982 No 1 hit Heather Norton, for the prosecution, asked the jury during the trial: "Did he really have to hurt him?"
Passing sentence at Snaresbrook crown court, east London, Judge David Radford said the singer's offence was "so serious that only an immediate sentence of imprisonment can be justified. 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 hand-cuffing and detention of Mr Carlsen shocked, degraded and traumatised." Carlsen, he added, had been "deprived of his liberty and his human dignity".
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