Injustice and the twisted legacy of Savile

Not guilty, the jury said. Yet you could hardly blame Michael Le Vell if he had reached the point where the verdict scarcely mattered.



He has a life sentence, he knows it, and we would need hearts of stone not to pity him for that, at least.

Not that he has much to commend him. His own barrister called him ‘a drunk, bad husband and inadequate father’, whose behaviour was sometimes ‘terrible’.

What happened to Michael Le Vell was an abuse of our judicial system waiting to happen; the inevitable consequence of widespread misapprehension about fame, sex and paedophilia

But there is a difference between a self-obsessed lush and a man who rapes a six-year-old child. And on the irrational principle of ‘no smoke without fire’, that lie will dog him for ever.

It has been a car crash of a courtroom drama; part of you couldn’t bear to look, while another part of you grabbed at every ghastly moment of it.

This was not simple prurience on our part: what happened to Michael Le Vell was an abuse of our judicial system waiting to happen; the inevitable consequence of widespread misapprehension about fame, sex and paedophilia.



The ‘evidence’ itself, as it unfolded in the witness box, would have had any sensible head shaking with disbelief.



The jury – and, by extension, the rest of us – were asked to believe stuff that crawled intact from the bowels of cheap fiction.



The teddy bear the girl claimed he held over her mouth to keep her quiet? The ‘don’t-tell-anyone’ and ‘it’s our little secret’? All staples of the trend for ‘misery lit’ best-sellers.

And that was just the words of the accuser. Her mother was something else.

The 'evidence' itself, as it unfolded in the witness box, would have had any sensible head shaking with disbelief. The jury were asked to believe stuff that crawled intact from the bowels of cheap fiction

According to her, although the abuse had gone on from when her daughter was six until she was 14, Mum wasn’t told until she took the girl away on one of those cranky motivational conferences for a nice bonding session – exactly as you or I might take our daughters on a spa break.



And lo: wouldn’t you know it? The conference just happened to be hosted by a woman who had been raped as a teenager – which, in turn, just happened to provoke Le Vell’s accuser to make a dramatic admission to her mother that she had been raped.



Mum was later to give her own evidence with such vehemence that you wondered whether it was she, rather than the girl, who had an axe to grind with Le Vell.



Certainly she never seemed bothered by what would have bothered me had it been my child: where was she, while her little girl was being assaulted? Downstairs watching Coronation Street?



We can, of course, only speculate why the girl might have brought the complaints in the first place.



We know that when she first complained, in 2011, her parents had recently separated and it is likely she would have been deeply upset.



We know, too, that the mid-teens are a funny age: young enough to tell an attention-grabbing fib, as children do – yet old enough to know that some fibs grow up to be proper crimes, such as ‘wasting police time’, and you can get into serious trouble if you don’t stick to them.



There is also the possibility of False Memory Syndrome, whereby people are steered into ‘remembering’ – and truly believing – something that never happened. This deserves consideration here.



The legacy of the Jimmy Savile scandal is a modern curate's egg: good, but only in parts

According to the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, ‘false memories can result from the influence of external factors, such as the opinion of an authority figure or information repeated in the culture’.



Well now. What is the mother in this affair, if not ‘an authority figure’? And the father had left home, so she was in fact the only authority figure.



As for ‘information repeated in the culture’? There, and I’d put money on this, is the nub of the whole case.



Consider: When the allegations were first made, in September 2011, Le Vell denied all, and in January 2012 the Crown Prosecution Service dropped the case, citing ‘insufficient evidence’.



Yet in February 2013, the principal adviser to the Director of Public Prosecutions re-opened the file and instructed the police to go ahead and charge Le Vell.



Why? How? There wasn’t a shred of new evidence save a few embellishments from the girl.



Yet it was still her and her mother’s words against Le Vell’s, with no forensic support either way. So what was the difference between 2011 and 2013?



I believe the answer lies in two words: ‘Jimmy’. And ‘Savile’. Or, as the False Memory Syndrome Foundation might put it: ‘Information repeated in the culture.’



The legacy of the Savile scandal is a modern curate’s egg: good, but only in parts.



It is obviously good that genuine victims of abuse have felt able to come forward, make allegations against the kind of people who arrogantly thought their status protected them and to see dirty old men punished as they deserve.



On the other hand, it has now gone so absurdly far that almost any man blessed by fame is presumed fair game for accusations of child abuse.



Furthermore, the burden of proof required to bring a prosecution has seemingly been lightened to a degree that simply does not serve justice.

This is especially true when the abuse is not recent: in the Le Vell case, a rape at the age of six is being alleged in court by someone who is 17; in Savile’s case, not to mention the rash of cases that followed, the time between alleged abuse and serious police action was even longer.



So although I don’t doubt that some of the ‘victims’ in these cases are telling the truth, I simply do not believe they all are.



Meanwhile, the mantra that ‘we must listen to what children say’ has subtly changed to ‘we must believe what children say’. The police and the CPS, knowing this, bring flimsy cases – like Le Vell’s – that should never have seen the light of day.



So another career bites the dust, and another man – heart, soul and reputation – is ruined.



It is to the credit of Le Vell’s jurors that they didn’t fall for it. But it is to the discredit of all involved that there is no happy ending. Le Vell, outed as an alcoholic womaniser, is finished.



The mother of the accused, if she has an ounce of decency, will realise that she failed to do the most important thing a mother does: to protect her child from a desperately harrowing ordeal.



And the girl? The poor, troubled girl. We can’t tell you her name – but I know it, the worldwide web knows it and every relative, friend or neighbour also knows it.



So here she is, just 17 and exposed to everyone who matters in her life as a liar.

