Tuesday, April 29, 2014
The 'show trial' of Max Clifford: being a sleazeball is not a legitimate basis of legal sanction
Just what was Max Clifford found guilty of, then? The only thing he did legally wrong – allegedly (there is no evidence beyond accusation – was to initiate sex with a girl a mere few months before her sixteenth birthday, which in our crazy times is deemed the legal age of consent despite the average age of female puberty being 11 going on 9. The alleged coercion amounted to a few girls claiming they were "forced" but actually simply acquiescing at the time through what the girls perceived to be a likely instrumental gain. For this, the girls themselves are responsible, not Max Clifford.
Being a sleazeball is not the basis of legal sanction. Clifford was not in any state-employed 'position of authority', but in control of a classic 'casting couch' scenario of which the girls and their parents cannot have been blind. Clearly, though, being a sleazeball is the basis of Clifford's conviction; the only basis, bar the minor age-of-consent indiscretion.
The wholly politically corrupted CPS was bound, eventually, to find a jury daft enough to be willing to take police-'trawled' parallel cases as mutually corroborative despite zero evidence – and this case out of all of these celebrity cases was a Herculean police/media 'trawling' binge. The persistence by the CPS with the Yewtree 'show trial' witch-hunt is rather akin to the EU foisting repeat elections until there is the 'right' result. It was not much of a surprise that if anyone in the Yewtree travesty was to be convicted it would be Max Clifford.
