Louise Woodward - the nanny accused of shaking a baby to death.
I was off work sick when the trial was on and watched it in a very concentrated way.
There were a number of issues that her defence lawyers absolutely should have ripped to shreds! “Lost” crucial evidence, witnesses not called, prosecution witnesses poorly cross examined if at all, the British/American English language barrier exploited many times by the prosecution lawyer...
I feel certain it was actually one of the parents IF there were a perpetrator - we’ve since had new discoveries re shaken baby syndrome that show that certain biological “evidence” that has been used in many of these cases to convict mainly women is now known to be possible to occur naturally in some babies.
Shocking miscarriage of justice in my opinion - even the original jury weren’t 100%
“I’m not sure about Max Clifford. I think perhaps he had a lot of dirt on a lot of powerful people and they wanted him kept quiet. And then of course he died in prison. How convenient.” I too found this one quite dubious and as a csa survivor myself I very much err on the side of “I believe you” but this one just didn’t feel right at all.
No single “type” of evidence should be enough to convict anyone, not a jailhouse confession (deeply dubious), not a pressured confession in custody, not witness evidence (notoriously unreliable), not cctv (again far from perfect and in this digital age very easy to falsify), not “expert testimony” (remember professor sir Roy meadow?) not even fingerprints or dna (which can very easily be planted or falsified or simply poorly collected and processed) - because every single one of these has a human element! And humans not just criminals are fallible, dishonest, have agendas etc
Did anyone see that csi:ny episode where they wrongly thought that there was a serial killer using various methods? Turned out to be someone in the factory making the swabs was ignoring the rules on contamination prevention! Well here’s the shocker - that apparently did happen! The episode dramatised it to the point it became public and caused a scandal for iirc DA and chief of police. In real life the issue was investigated before it reached that point and the cause of the weirdly matching dna discovered early on and rightly found to be down to a tech fucking up.
Dna can be replicated, planted, wrongly recorded etc.
NO evidence is perfect.
It’s incredibly hard to even get the police to take historical sexual abuse cases on, yes due to the lack of evidence and witness/accuser testimony can be unreliable - memory is a very odd thing. I forgot a lot of what happened until I had dd and then I’d get flashes of things but some incidents I have misremembered when they happened, but I firmly believe I’m right THAT they DID happen and I absolutely know who the perpetrator was
“paedophiles groom children and make sure they get them alone to abuse them.” Oh wow really?! And what is your experience or qualifications in this realm?
Because not only as a csa survivor but someone who’s worked in child protection I can assure you that you’re WRONG!
I find that comment not only ignorant but really fucking offensive!
I was molested when other adults were present, many of us were, there’s quite a few of us on mn with similar experiences - it’s why on threads about potential/known abusers we caution ops not to be lulled into a false sense of security on this. That “I’ll keep an eye and he’ll never be alone with them” isn’t good enough.
Several of saviles victims iirc were molested in the studios while the cameras were on!
STOP perpetuating abuse myths - they do FAR more harm than you can possibly imagine!