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Continuum Magazine
VOL. 4 No. 5

There was a time when we tortured and burnt witches. It was not possible, of course, to prove that someone was a witch, but our ancestors got round that little legal problem by simply dispensing with the need for evidence. An unsupported accusation that whipped up public hysteria was quite sufficient to send hundreds of men and women to their deaths. A community justified its actions by claiming it was carrying out God’s work.

Today, in our more sophisticated society, we no longer persecute witches. We hunt out and prosecute pedophiles instead. Unlike witches, pedophiles undoubtedly do exist and we are right to arrest them, even if the debate remains necessary over precisely where to set the age of consent. And we are morally at liberty to condemn anyone who sexually violates another person against their will. But, if we are to distance ourselves from the lynch-mob tactics of our witch-hunting ancestors, we should ensure that we only root out and punish sex offenders using honest and fair laws. We should not dispense with the need for evidence, no matter how hard it may be to prove pedophile or other sex offences, and we should certainly not send people to prison on the basis of an unsupported accusation.

In September 1995, a 16-year-old youth called Nathan was arrested by the police in his home town of Malvern, Worcestershire, and charged with ten burglaries at the homes of old people living on their own, with another 48 similar offences to be taken into consideration. He was remanded in custody to Gloucester Prison to await sentence by the court. He was warned that, because of the unusual quantity and seriousness of his offences, he faced a Section 53 sentence – a sentence longer than the maximum two years usually imposed on a 16-year-old. Inside the prison he was also badly bullied. It was his first time in jail.

One day, soon after going inside, he telephoned his mother. Sobbing, he made an allegation to her that I had sexually abused him on a number of occasions three years before. His mother reported the conversation to Nathan’s social worker and the police. An investigation was started, although I knew nothing about any of this until eight months later when I was arrested.

Nathan, however, reaped some immediate benefits from his allegations against me. His social worker wrote to the prison and got him moved away from the bullies, on the grounds that he was helping police with their inquiries into a sex abuse case, which would make him a target for bullies. A favorable pre-sentence report was written, urging leniency from the court, on the grounds that he had only committed his crimes because he had been sexually abused. So he was given just 22 months, of which he served only eleven.

While still in prison, Nathan was interviewed by the police on two occasions, making a statement each time. In the first, he alleged that I had indecently assaulted him by getting him drunk at my home, then, after he had gone to bed in the spare room, that I had gone in and forced him to give me a blow job. In the second statement, a couple of months later, he now added two accusations of buggery. He claimed these three incidents had happened in the Autumn of 1992, after he had been on a camping holiday to France with me and three of our friends.

I was blissfully unaware of all this until Saturday 18 May, 1996, when seven plain-clothed police officers forced their way into my house in Malvern and arrested me. I was still in bed at 8:30 a.m. having only returned home from London for the weekend at 5:00 a.m. I was told I was being arrested on suspicion of committing buggery on Nathan when he was aged 13. My response was: "This is absolutely ridiculous." And it was. Although I am openly gay, and have even been deputy editor and acting editor of the Pink Paper, Britain’s national lesbian and gay newspaper, I have never indulged in penetrative anal sex, either way. It is just not my style, and all my friends know that. I never have, and I never could have buggered Nathan. I did, however, have quite a lot to do with him in 1992, but I never laid a finger on him sexually, nor was I attempting or planning to.

I was questioned for two hours by the police and gave the fullest possible answers to their questions. I was amazed when, after all this, and despite them having no evidence whatsoever other than Nathan’s word, they charged me with one indecent assault and two buggeries. I was released on police bail, on condition that I did not contact any prosecution witnesses.

The case took another eight months to come to trial. In August, after Nathan was released from prison, I began to hear on the grapevine that he was trying to withdraw the allegations. Of course, I thought. They no longer serve him any purpose, and he was afraid of having to follow through what he had started, with the risk of being shown up as a liar in the witness box at my trial. The police, however, scenting a high-profile case against a leading member of the gay community, and someone who was also well known as a BBC newsreader and journalist (my pre-Pink employment), refused to let him pull out. They interpreted his reluctance as the fear of having to undergo the trauma of facing me in court and reliving his painful memories. Despite the fact that Nathan would be 18, they began to apply for him to give his evidence via a video link, or at least, behind a screen. All this was calculated to impress upon a jury his bravery, and the trauma he was alleged to have suffered at my hands.

I was confident before the trial that, as an innocent man, the truth was on my side. There was, of course, absolutely no supporting evidence. I was not denying my friendship with Nathan, or that he often joined me and my friends at weekends. In fact, it was my two friends, Gerard and Jason, that he was really friends with. They were in a relationship, and came to stay at my house every weekend from February 1992, when they first met, until September that year. Nathan only ever came around when they were there. He was fully aware that they were in a gay relationship and, although I never discussed it with him, he was fully aware of my orientation. Nathan, who identified as straight, was entirely comfortable with us, and clearly did not feel threatened by me or any of my various gay friends who visited at weekends.

My first major shock, in preparing for the trial, came when my solicitor told me that because the Conservative government has changed the law to make it easier for the police to prosecute child sex cases, they had no need to support the case with corroborative evidence. Nathan’s allegation was quite sufficient for a conviction. Since there was no other evidence, the jury would be forced to make its decision by judging Nathan’s word against mine. The only defense available to me was a weak blanket denial – "it never happened". The dates were drawn too widely, encompassing several months, so I could not even provide an alibi to say I was elsewhere, or doing something else at the time. Nathan did not even have to prove that anyone had ever buggered him. At least with a murder, there is a body, and so someone must have done it, even if it was not the accused. That is the question now being raised following the release of those convicted of murdering the newspaper boy Carl Bridgewater. And the same is true of most crimes. Someone must have done it. But under child sex laws, it is not even necessary to prove that anything happened in the first place. Nathan was free to invent both crime and perpetrator.

All hopes that Nathan might pull out were dashed when the police personally collected him and took him to Hereford Crown Court for the opening day of my trial on 21 January. So my hopes now lay in Rachel Brand, my barrister, breaking him down in the witness box to show him up as a liar. The proceedings began with the judge, with great fairness, ordering social services to disclose those papers in Nathan’s file relating to his being bullied in prison, the serious charges he faced, and the benefits he received by his allegations. Clearly the judge thought them relevant.

To my great relief, Nathan’s evidence – given without any video link or screen, on account of his age – was greatly at odds with what he had said in his statement 12 months bef5ore. He was of course having to recall incidents he had invented, rather than real events which stick clearly in the mind. He contradicted himself in several significant particulars. In court, he now said that all the incidents happened before the trip to France. When challenged, he had no explanation. Rachel Brand said: "Surely you would have known when you went to France whether you had something to fear from this man or not. You would have remembered your feelings about him?" The indecent assault and the first buggery now got telescoped together either side of a Saturday night. In his statement, he claimed nothing had happened the next morning, nothing was said, and he just went home. He denied trying to blame me for his crimes to get himself out of prison – and had no explanation when it was pointed out to him for why he had made precisely that allegation in his statement. He could not explain why he kept going back to my house, or why he never told anyone for three years. He even suddenly came up with a previously unmentioned fourth incident. Considerable doubt was cast on his descriptions of the buggery positions, my barrister pointing out that as he described it, the act was physically impossible.

Gerard and Jason both gave evidence to show that they must have been staying at my house when Nathan alleged he was there on his own.

My own full and frank evidence in the witness box, in which I fully admitted being gay, was dismissed by the prosecutor as "dangerously smooth talking" whereas Nathan’s stumbling and shifting was "an act of bravery".

I was stunned when after three hours the jury of nine men and three women returned a guilty verdict on all three counts. The judge, I believe, was equally surprised. My solicitor says his four and a half year sentence, being so light for the somewhat savage and inhuman acts I was supposed to have committed, was very light. I am told that I have no grounds for appeal, unless there is new evidence. So here I now write, in an extremely spartan cell, enduring the rigid regime of Gloucester prison. I am also forced to go on Rule 43 – segregation from the mainstream prisoners – for my own protection. Everyone here knows about me – I was described as "evil" in the News of the World.

Here I sit and brood on the injustice that has sent an innocent man to jail. Innocence is no defense. The jury, I believe, was homophobic. Despite all the obvious contradictions, they chose to believe Nathan’s word against mine: queer, therefore he must be a child molester. I condemn a law that enables someone like Nathan to manipulate the police and the courts to his own selfish ends. But I brood particularly on this sinister thought: the gay community has rightly been worried in recent years about increasing use of a legal ploy known as the Portsmouth Defense, where a man accused of murder gets the charge reduced to manslaughter by claiming he "understandably" lost his temper when the victim made a homosexual advance on him – something he does not need to prove. He therefore escapes with a few years in prison instead of a life sentence.

Nathan appears to have made use of a subtle development of the Portsmouth defense, one that could be copied by any young criminal who wishes to win leniency from the court by claiming (without having to prove it) that he only committed his crimes because he had been sexually abused. All he has to do is polish up his story and point the finger at some convenient and vulnerable gay man. Like the witch-hunters of yore, he is helped by a law which allows him the unique luxury of not having to prove his allegations. And, like the witch-hunters of yore, he can rely on public hysteria against pedophiles to convince a jury that anyone who’s gay must most likely be also a child molester. They too will often justify their actions as doing God’s work.

I suppose I should at least be grateful that, for the time being, we have no death penalty in this country. But this miscarriage of justice will scar me for the rest of my life.

• Letters can be sent to Nigel Edwards at: KD1492 Edwards, HMP Gloucester, Barrack Square, Gloucester GL1 2JN, UK.

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