Three Legal Cases : Ched Evans, Cliff Richard & ...?

Earlier this year I went to the theatre with my brother. I can tell you very few details about this, not because I was drunk or asleep during the performance, but because you might be able to identify the person who I am going to write about. However, trust me when I say that I went to the theatre with my brother. He mentioned to me that he had heard that one of the main actors in the play currently had a superinjunction. My brother being a lawyer, I trusted him to be up on these things, even though superinjunctions tend to ban not just details of a legal matter being published, but any discussion of either the case or even that a superinjunction or the case itself exists. In fact, superinjunctions are so hush hush that Microsoft Word is trying to tell me that even the word does not exist.

During the interval, I did what any interested legal expert would do and went online with a search of the actor’s name and ‘superinjunction’. According to a twitter feed based abroad, the actor had paid £1,000 to a prostitute (and probably a lot more to expensive lawyers to make sure that no-one ever heard about this). Doubtless he wanted to be spared the embarrassment of anyone thinking that he was overcharged.

My attitude to prostitution tends to be that there are many things that would not exist in an ideal world – prostitution, abortion, Southampton Football Club come to mind – but we do not live in an ideal world and until we do, we ought to be sensible about how we deal with these things. More to the point, if the actor involved has used the services of a prostitute, then I am not distracted from his acting ability by the news. I suppose that he assumes that others would not be so generous.

The irony is that we do actually know how an actor should deal with being caught visiting a prostitute. Hugh Grant wrote the textbook on this one and, though you may question some of his film choices since, there was no notable decline in his popularity after the strategy of ‘fess up and say sorry’ was deployed. I also learned a lot from the National Enquirer’s outrage at why he had not just phoned up the studio he was working for and arranged for some trustworthy ‘company’ to be provided. They know how to do these things, apparently.

This actor’s response was to go to the courts and take out a superinjunction (allegedly). Had he not done so, the story would have probably played as a minor scandal for a few days in the tabloid newspapers and that would have been that. I would probably never had heard of it and it would not be featured on the superinjunctions twitter feed. All in all, I think that fess up and say sorry would have been a better strategy for him.

I do see the tabloid front pages when I am in my local shop or at the garage and recently one of them shouted at me, “Cliff : My reputation is ruined.” No Cliff, it is not. However, the newspaper believed that this allegation is being used by Cliff Richard as a reason to pursue the BBC and the South Yorkshire Police Force for damages over the televised raid on one of his homes. Compensation in the millions is being talked about due to the ‘damage to his reputation’.

I would like to stress that I do think that we have learned in recent years just how cosy the media and the police are and that the televised raid was a nonsense that everyone involved should have been ashamed about. However, I do not think that it has changed one person’s perception of Cliff Richard. His fans love him (there will be Cliff 2017 Calendars on sale in TESCO soon) and there are other people who do not love him. Every now and then someone has said to me that they have heard a rumour about Cliff Richard or that ‘everyone knows’ something about him but no-one has ever suggested to me that he was a child abuser or anything on the scale of Jimmy Savile. I would be surprised if people thought that now.

Back in the 1990s, there was a round of Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer’s mock quiz show ‘Shooting Stars’ which involved the following question in the ‘True or False’ round – “True or False : OJ Simpson is a murderer’. Bob Mortimer reacted with horror and said, ‘You can’t ask that!’ Vic replied, ‘Why not?’ Bob’s response, ‘The guy killed his wife he’s capable of anything!’ That exchange was used in a BBC information booklet to explain the legal basis of comedy, namely that the likelihood that OJ Simpson was watching and would be offended was very small and that it was clearly meant for humour. The next (and last line) in that sequence is the question that replaced it – “True of False : Cliff Richard is gay.”

My point is that sometimes when it comes to legal action, the rich and powerful reach for the lawyers’ phone number when really keeping quiet would suit them better. I dare say that Cliff Richard suffered considerable distress from one of his homes being raided on television, but every time he talks about it, he makes a link between himself and Operation Yew Tree which would otherwise now be forgotten. I also have to say that as a prominent Christian, he might consider that someone once gave advice about turning the other cheek.

This brings us to our final legal case, involving all-round Mr Nice Guy, Ched Evans. If I was his PR people, I would have told him after last Friday’s not guilty verdict at his retrial for rape that his best course of action was to shut up. He was already coming across as a rich footballer with an inflated sense of entitlement (the kind who thought that he could have any woman he wanted ... as he said to the police after his arrest and which he ‘excused’ in court by saying that he had said it because he had not ‘expected it to be read out in court’). A little humility and generosity at this point would probably work wonders. He will probably be awarded compensation for having been imprisoned and this is going to cause trouble as it is (while the complainant in the case is said to be moving abroad after five years of threats, intimidation and being placed under police protection in several different areas of the country). Yes, a touch of down-to-earth reasonable behaviour would help no end.

Ched Evans’s family have let it be known that they intend to sue Gloria Hunniford and ITV. The reason for this is a discussion about the case held on ‘Loose Women’ on ITV this week. I had read that ‘Loose Women’ is actually carefully scripted with lawyers checking the discussion lines in advance so I was quite surprised to read this. I also did what anyone sensible would do – I looked online for a transcript of what was said. Just as with the anonymous actor and his superinjunction, I would not even have known that there was anything to look for until Ched’s loving relatives decided to threaten a TV channel with legal action.

What do I think of Gloria’s comments? I think that she gave a broad overview of the events as understood by someone who had read about the case and ended with the conclusion that she would not send her daughter to Ched Evans for sex education classes. This, it is claimed, is ‘misrepresentation’. I wonder if the intention is to obtain a quick out of court settlement because otherwise the legal case is going to be another chance for people to hear about Mr Evans sneaking out the fire escape and so on.

You can see where I am going with this, I am sure. I would not have known about any of this but for the threat of legal action. If there were people who thought during the original trial that Ched Evans was a spoilt kid with a sense of entitlement then does threatening to stop people criticising him (sorry, ‘misrepresenting’ – funny how those two things look similar) look any less like the actions of someone operating under a delusion of their own importance?

The particularly bizarre thing about the threat to sue ITV is that there are far worse things out there. A link came up on my Facebook timeline this week for an international website offering the story of ‘How a British Athlete Used A Victim’s Sexual History to Dodge a Rape Conviction’. That is frankly libellous. Can you believe it? Someone calling Ched Evans a ‘British Athlete’, UK Athletics should sue immediately! Seriously, the rest of that headline is terrible. Whatever you might think of Mr Evans, he has been cleared by a court of law and to say that he has ‘dodged a rape conviction’ is grounds for legal action. Except there will be no legal action against an internet news site because it is a peculiarity of such things that the difficult legal cases are never pursued.

The greatest irony of all this is that the current focus on ‘living in the moment’ leaves us forgetting just how much changes with time and how quickly. Those who were alive in the mid 1980s will remember the huge amount of time, energy and taxpayers’ money that the Conservative government of the day spent on trying to stop publication of the book ‘Spycatcher’ by former MI5 operative Peter Wright. Wright had only decided to write his memoirs when the government reneged on paying his full pension entitlement from his time working at GCHQ and he was looking for a retirement income. Think this through then – the government refuses to pay a small amount of money to a retired man, then spends a large amount of money trying to stop him create an additional income for his retirement with the effect that they boosted sales of his book to the point where he could be a millionaire for the rest of his days.

However, I am currently reading a history of the British secret services. All the stories and allegations that the Thatcher government once thought that we had to be protected from for the good of the country are all in it. Time has made it all far less interesting and I am not convinced that it was ever that scandalous.

If I were a PR person, I would tell my famous clients that no-one’s first thought when angry or upset should be to reach for their lawyer’s number. Sometimes it is more dignified not to sue. It usually more sensible in the long run too.