Trumped up accusations of rape show a certain bias towards wealthy celebrities. I’m sure this is a sheer coincidence – because, if I weren’t so sure, I’d have to suspect bad will on the accusers’ part.
And should I dare express such feelings in public, I’d be accused of (charged with?) misogyny at least, and probably racism, homophobia and xenophobia into the bargain, the assumption being that anyone guilty of one must also be guilty of the whole cluster.
The coincidental tendency to target wealthy celebrities has most recently manifested itself in Northern Ireland, where two international rugby players, Messrs Jackson and Olding, have been cleared of a spurious rape charge.
The two players and their friends were celebrating something or other in the VIP section of a popular Belfast nightclub. There they picked up a few girls with dubious claims to the requisite VIP status.
The party moved on to Jackson’s house, where, according to the claimant, they “kissed consensually” and then ended up in his bedroom, accompanied by Olding. The next day the two athletes exchanged boastful notes about “spit-roasting” the girl.
As Olding put it, “pumped a bird with Jacko last night, roasted her”.
If you understand the culinary reference, you don’t need my explanation, and if you don’t, you’re better off remaining in your state of innocence.
Anyway, the girl claimed she had been raped, the two young men faced trial, the proceedings dragged on for two years, their careers were ruined, and last week the jury acquitted them after deliberating for just under four hours.
The defence was on to a winner. First, there was the general consideration that the imputed cooking method is hard to force on a woman without subjecting one of the perpetrators to the risk of mutilation. Second, and most important, there were eyewitnesses.
One of them, another VIP girl, walked in on the threesome in progress and reported no distress on the girl’s part, quite the opposite. The eyewitness was invited to join the fun but declined, which speaks highly of her moral fibre.
I haven’t read the transcripts of the trial, but the evidence presented by the defence must have been overwhelming for the jury to acquit after so little deliberation. After all, the jurors were under heavy political pressure to convict: rape and all other forms of unwanted sexual attention have moved to the forefront of politicised crimes.
Case open and shut, one would think. Well, one would think wrong.
First there was an outburst of rage in the social media. One irate girlfriend of an Olympic athlete accused rugby players in general and those two in particular of treating women “like meat”.
That’s probably true, but irrelevant in this context. If there’s no rape involved, and the sex is consensual, then it logically follows that the women involved agree to being treated like meat. If they then bring up a spurious rape charge, the man’s meat becomes the same man’s poison, but it doesn’t make him a criminal.
Then the demonstrations came, in Belfast and other Ulster cities. The feminist demonstrators carried placards saying “I believe her”. What was the basis of such credulity?
Did they examine the evidence and find it wanting? Did they interview the counsel? Did they possess information that hadn’t made it to court? Did they uncover new witnesses?
Of course not. It’s just that the placards were abbreviated to the detriment of the message. What the demonstrators really meant was that they believed any woman accusing any man of rape, regardless of evidence.
Hence the demonstrators pursued not justice but a political cause that, if allowed to vanquish, would destroy the foundations of our legal system and therefore society. And good riddance, according to the feminist groups.
One such posted a message on Facebook, saying that our criminal justice system is “not fit for purpose when it comes to dealing with sexual crimes.” Right. It’s good enough to deal with murder, robbery and GBH, but not with rape.
What’s the nature of this disparity? As far as I know, the legal method is the same in all cases. In our adversarial system, the prosecution presents the evidence and arguments for one side, the defence for the other, and the jury decides whose evidence and arguments carry the day.
What makes rape trials so special? Yes, they often boil down to his word against hers, which makes it hard to build an ironclad case. But the same situation arises in other trials as well, if less frequently. And anyway, in this trial there was enough eyewitness evidence not to rely on the defendants’ word.
It’s hard to get rid of the impression that the only legal system that would satisfy the feminists would be one in which the middlemen, the police and the courts, would be eliminated altogether. Anyone accused of rape would be automatically presumed guilty as charged and go straight to jail, Monopoly style.
In this context, I was truly shocked by the announcement made by Cressida Dick, the Commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police.
The Met, said the Commissioner, would no longer blindly believe rape complaints. Of course, she reassured the feminists scorned, “It is very important to victims to feel that they are going to be believed.”
However, “We are, of course, likely to believe you but we are investigators and we have to investigate.”
Does this mean that until now the Met has acted as merely a clerk processing papers on the way to the courthouse without even bothering to check the evidence? No wonder our legal system has blown millions on hundreds of spurious rape cases, like the Belfast one, that should never have reached the courts.
A country in which politics trumps justice is one in which both suffer irreparably. Witness the fact that London has overtaken New York in murder rate, the only crime category in which we have hitherto lagged behind.
Perhaps if the Met spent more time on chasing murderers and less on… Well, I’d better stop here before I too find myself in the dock.
But, Mr B, surely, as a resident of London you cannot have failed to notice that our brave, new society is now comprised of a hierarchy of ‘oppressors’ versus a hierarchy of the ‘oppressed’, and that, as white, middle class, middle aged, heterosexual males, we are at the top of the former and bottom of the latter?
It is why our, thankfully departing, DPP, no doubt responding to memes such as #metoo, pursued unprovable ‘rape’ cases against white males with such vigour – despite statistical data pointing to a disproportionate number of provable rapes (physical evidence of forced penetration and violence) having been committed by – ahem – men who are further up the ‘oppressed’ hierarchy.
I grew up having an unbounded faith in our criminal justice system. It used to have some semblance of independence and impartiality (as the statue on top of the Old Bailey still implies). We now live in a country where justice has been politicised and everything is policed except crime.
It is comforting to see that utter incompetence, even extending to being responsible for the killing of an innocent man, is in today’s UK no bar to reaching the highest position in your chosen profession. Lesser beings, burdened with personal and professional integrity, would have resigned. But Cressida is made of sterner stuff.
“It is very important to victims to feel that they are going to be believed.”
Indeed. It’s also important that they should actually be victims.