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The tears flowed as Mike Morgan phoned his mum, between sobs insisting: “Mum, I didn’t do it.”

Accused of rape, the outgoing showman who loved the bright lights and kudos of being manager of one of Liverpool’s top gay bars, crumbled and cried as he turned to the person he trusted most.

And though the claims were unfounded and allegations not pursued, his loving mum Linda has revealed how the ordeal effectively killed him.

“Mikey couldn’t live with it,” she says.

“He knew he was innocent but he didn’t want to carry on believing people could even think he was capable of such a horrendous crime.”

His health deteriorated and, on February 13, this year, Mike Morgan passed away in his sleep – as he had predicted he would just two weeks before.

Now Linda Morgan is left picking up the pieces: heartbroken and devastated but fixed, too, with a mother’s courage and determination to right a wrong and defend her son to the end.

“I just want people to remember Mike as he was. A gentle giant and a good man.

“He was generous to a fault and a decent person. He was not a rapist.”

The trauma began on Sunday, September 25, when Mike, then 40, was arrested outside Superstar Boudoir on Stanley Street as he arrived to open up.

The next day he was bailed pending further enquiries – but after investigation police decided to take no further action.

But the story doesn’t and didn’t end there.

“People need to think about the consequences of their actions before they make up such vile claims,” says Linda, who still lives in the family’s home city of Bradford.

“The hurt and the implications go much deeper than people imagine – people always think there’s no smoke without fire.

“Look at what the actor Michael Le Vell went through recently, because of the allegations and charges brought against him before he was found not guilty.

“People’s identity should remain a secret until – or unless – they are proven guilty or it can ruin people’s lives.

“Because it did just that with Michael’s.”

Like her son, Linda’s tears flow. But they are not only ones of sadness and despair.

For her, there are tears of joy, as she remembers the little boy she loved and the man he grew up to be.

“Michael has always had this wonderful effect on people, that he left them with something of himself,” smiles Linda. “Going back to when he was young, Mikey would go and dig over other people’s gardens, or shovel snow in the winter for neighbours. I didn’t have to ask him, he just did it.

“He and my other children Rebecca and Matthew got whooping cough as children and Mikey and Rebecca ended up in hospital. Because I had to leave them to go and look after Matthew who was ill at home Mikey, who was about three or four, turned to me and said ‘don’t worry mum, we will be all right. I will look after Rebecca’.

“How many other children that young would think of that?

“That didn’t change as he grew up. A lot of people in Liverpool know how good he was and what a big heart he had. He was just an exceptional human being and I am so proud of my son. I just want people to know that.”

Of course, like most adults, Mike Morgan had his faults, which his mum accepts and doesn’t try to hide.

Though married to Debbie in 1994 – “who, even after she found out, loved him with a passion” – Mike was gay and had a male partner. Linda admits he had had affairs with both sexes, with a reputation as a ‘ladies’ man’.

“When he told me he was gay I was knocked off my feet. I didn’t understand it, but I didn’t love him any less.”

The nightclub manager had dabbled with cocaine and at one point had a drink problem, points out Linda. She is honest to a fault but, then, she isn’t out to portray her son as whiter than white – just the man she knew, for whom an unproven allegation led to a early death.

“Mike was not the healthiest person, but the allegations were just the nails in his coffin.”

Unable to deal with the fear of what people might, wrongly, think of him, says Linda, Mike’s health began to fail.

He started having panic attacks, cried constantly and was being treated for depression.

“Mike was overweight with high blood pressure but he stopped taking his tablets – the ones that were keeping him alive. It was like he had a death wish.

“He just felt that he was better off dead, that life was no longer worth living.

“I tried to keep his spirits up. He couldn’t sleep and would call me in the early hours, crying, and I had never heard him like that.

“I saw him a few days before he died and the look on his face was one of desolation. He couldn’t live with the claims. He was in pain. The rape allegations killed him. But no-one should be allowed to destroy another person’s life like that.

“I wish I could have helped him more. I tried to get him to come home but he loved Liverpool. It was his home...

“So now I’m asking the people of Liverpool to remember the man who loved their city and took it to his heart. Don’t think of the man he was wrongly claimed to be, but the man you know him to be: decent, kind, loved and with a heart of gold.”